


Volta

by jouissant



Series: What things we have heard together [4]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Established Relationship, Father-Daughter Relationship, Flashbacks, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Canon, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 09:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8139200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Dick and Nix live contentedly in rural Pennsylvania until Nix's daughter pays an unexpected visit and calls up memories of the past.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Errors in timeline and/or discrepancies between real life and canonverse are either artistic license or my own inability to keep things straight. Or both!

1957

On a Saturday morning Lewis Nixon was given to sleeping in.

In the old days there'd have been no choice, of course, alcohol like sap in his veins, sickening maple-syrup kinds of mornings you swam through. Now that the old days were old, now that Lew drank a glass of wine like a civilized person some nights and a glass of milk like a toddler most others he could, he supposed, wake up early. He could slip out of bed at first light without the aid of an alarm, like a certain fellow milk-drinker of his acquaintance. He could dress in the cool dawn and creep downstairs with the dog, out the front door and jog—honest-to-God jog—down the drive and down the road and down through the rolling pastureland into town. 

He could clutch in his sweaty palm enough money for a newspaper and a sack of bakery doughnuts afterwards, cider in the fall and in the summer cinnamon and powdered sugar frosted like a snowdrift. He could clatter through the screen door and roar back up the stairs like a goddamned red freight train and make as much noise as possible, heave himself onto the bed heedless of remaining sleepers and declare, when met with subverbal protest: "I got doughnuts," as if that made up for anything.

He could, but he didn't. If there was one thing Lew was coming to know about business it was that redundancy ought to be avoided at all costs. Leaving the doughnut run to others, then, simply made good sense. And anyway, if Lew got the doughnuts it stood to reason Dick would make the coffee out of some misplaced sense of universal balance, and that didn't do anyone any favors. Even Dick had to admit Lew made better coffee.

"You got too used to drinking that crank case oil in the service," Lew would say. "Meanwhile, I maintained my innate sense of refinement."

"If that's what you want to call it," Dick would reply, smiling noncommittally into his cup. "Looked to me like there was never enough actual coffee in your mug to make a fair judgement one way or another."

At which point Lew would see fit to shut him up, with some stray powdered sugar someplace to facilitate the proceedings. Another reason not to get out of bed too terribly early, because more often than not they ended up back in it. Dick Winters made a bed with hospital corners sharp enough to give you a papercut, and the destruction of all that hard work was a travesty Lew would not be party to.

"Stop talking about the bed," said Dick against his neck. Lew kissed him. He tasted like coffee.

***

Dick had his head pillowed on Lew's shoulder, hair dark with sweat for the second time that morning. Lew, for his part, had enjoyed precisely the form of exercise he liked best and was basking in the afterglow like a lizard. He couldn't possibly think about having to do anything, other than maybe doze off again.

"So," Dick asked him. "What have you got to do today?"

"Dunno," Lew said. "Not much. How about you?"

Dick shrugged, his body slipping against Lew’s like a fish. "I need to fix that loose slat in the fence. We're on borrowed time before the horses figure it out and decide to take a grand tour of the countryside."

"Get someone in to fix it."

"Not on a Saturday. Anyway—"

"You like to do it yourself," Lew said. "I know."

"You think I'm ridiculous," Dick said, breath clammy on Lew's chest.

"Only a little."

"Hmm." Dick pulled the quilt over them both. If he was planning to fix the fence, he wasn't doing it in the immediate future. Lew leaned in and brushed his lips over Dick's forehead. He murmured something Lew couldn't make out, and then fell silent. The room became once again heavy with sleep, though for the moment Lew eluded its pull. 

It wasn't only that Dick liked the work; Lew knew that. It was, for lack of better phrasing, the Saturdayness of the matter. On a Friday or a Monday he and Dick might be incidental, a couple of guys who’d served together. But a Saturday was imbued somehow with the same sleepy intimacy that dragged them back to bed on the strength of a bag of doughnuts. There was nothing to see on a Saturday but the truth of what lay between them, however raw, however unappealing.

Beside him Dick stretched and yawned, and Lew was overcome by an embarrassing amount of tenderness. He didn't want to think about the fence, he decided.

It was Saturday, and he didn't want to think about anything.

In the end Dick didn't get to the fence until mid-afternoon, wandering down to the pasture with his toolbox thunking against his thigh and Buster trotting to heel alongside, pink tongue lolling in the heat. Lew watched them go, and then he opened the icebox and considered the matter of dinner.

It was by now a well-worn joke: Lew Nixon had become a gourmet. He liked to pat his gut lovingly and say to Dick and Harry that possibly the better term was gourmand. They always laughed dutifully, though the distinction was too Continental for anyone but him. It was true, though; Lew did like to cook. He found it a respectable use of his time, on par with reading and with walking the dog. He liked the way you could read a recipe like a map, and found he cared a surprising amount about cooking's capacity for artistry, and because he was an unrepentant snob he liked the fact that the fact that the high priests of haute cuisine, the altars at which his fellow gastrophiles worshipped, were reassuringly French.

"We've gotta go back to Paris," he always said to Dick. "I'll take you to all the best places."

Dick frowned. "I think you'd better go with your sister. Paris would be wasted on me. Last time I was there—"

"You took a bath. I know. But Jesus, Dick, if I can lose my taste for whiskey you ought to be able to acquire one for—for beef Bourguignon, or rognons de veaux, or profiteroles."

"What's that last one again?"

"Choux pastry with ice cream. I made it on your birthday and you pouted because it wasn't a real cake."

"I did not pout. I was just surprised."

"Yeah, yeah."

Now it was summer. By late afternoon the kitchen would be stifling, and Lew in no mood to put the oven on. Cold chicken, then. Dick wasn't picky, so long as the food was familiar. Satisfied, he went into the sitting room and read awhile until the still air began to be too much, and then he set his book down on the sofa beside him and stood up, stretched, decided he felt the hollowness of the afternoon a little too keenly, and that he generally lied through his teeth when he said he didn't have a taste for whiskey anymore.

You'd better get out yourself of the house, he thought.

He ambled down to the bottom of the pasture, sunglasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. He had his hands in his pockets and when his Ray Bans rode too low he tipped his head back and let them slide home again. Overhead the sky was harshly blue, just beginning to soften out to the west. Lew half-hoped for Dick to look up and see him coming and think he looked a little majestic, but Dick would be too absorbed in the fenceline to notice the figure Lew cut along the field, and anyway he didn't really think that was the sort of thought Dick Winters would have about a person. As it was, he made his final approach through a veil of buzzing gnats, putting paid to any notion of majesty.

"Oh God," he said, batting at the air. "I think I ate one."

"Probably more than one," Dick offered.

Lew made a face. "Remind me why I moved to the country." 

Dick laughed. "Certainly not the company."

"Well, that goes without saying." 

Lew leaned on the nearest intact fencepost. The dog came bounding up out of the tall grass, and he at least gave Lew the welcome he was due. He reached down and scratched him on the top of the head. "How are you getting on?" he asked Dick.

"Almost good as new," Dick said, whacking the bright wood of the replacement board. He blew a long, whistling breath out through his teeth, drew out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

"Sure is still down here," he said, squinting up at Lew through the fog of insects, which were gilded in the slanting light like motes of dust. "I was thinking of going for a swim."

The little creek that wove through the woods hemming the pasture ran thin as ribbon along most of its path to the river, but if you tramped beside it long enough you could find places it deepened and pooled, offering up what could pass for a swimming hole and the brown trout that had appeared as if by magic one day. Dick had promptly caught a brace of them for Lew to cook for dinner fried up with butter, poor eating by virtue of size but sweet-fleshed all the same. That night they'd felt so flush with the fruits of their own labor they let the barn cat into the house to pick at the discarded skeletons.

"The mosquitoes will be awful," Lew said. He was already unbuttoning his shirt.

Dick set aside his hammer and nails and they walked into the woods together stripped to the waist. Buster followed awhile, but he dropped off on the trail of some enticing scent as they picked their way back to the creek. The woods were cool, the air around them humid and soft, alive with birdsong and the violin screech of distant frogs. Even Lew had to admit it was idyllic, mosquitoes and all. They walked for twenty minutes or so until they found a place where the creek bent like an elbow, half dammed up by industrious beavers. Dick pulled up short, and it was only as he did so and Lew walked smack into him that he realized he'd been two steps back from Dick's left shoulder the whole time.

"Old habits," he said with a shrug.

They made camp on a big flat rock that lay broadly beside the creek like a slumbering dragon. They kicked off their shoes, tugged off damp socks and draped them in patches of sun. Lew pressed his feet to the rock, his skin pale against the rough grey and faded neon lichen. Dick stood in front of him staring into the shallows, hands on his hips. Lew watched him as he began to undress, and thought idly that the sight approximated some voyeuristic teenage fantasy so long as you left aside the small matter of Dick's sex.

Oblivious, Dick unbuttoned his fly and shucked off pants and underwear with a workmanlike efficiency borne of sports and summer camp and then the Army, years of instinctive locker room blindness. Lew remembered staring hard at slimy walls, counting the drops of water that sheeted down the tile and feeling his face flame. By the time he got to the paratroops shame was mostly dormant, but Lew still watched the walls in the showers just in case. Even now, his eyes running the length of Dick's body, he felt surveilled, as though he ought to let his focus falter and look through Dick into the close-hewn trees instead.

Dick turned to look at him. The easy lines of his body and the guilelessness of his expression were somehow heartbreaking. "Aren't you coming in?" he asked Lew. Of course he was only thinking of swimming. Dick had an earnestness Lew couldn't tarnish, though not for lack of trying.

"Yeah, yeah. Keep your shirt on," Lew said. "Oh, wait."

Dick laughed and stepped into the water. Lew let him wade out into the middle before he undressed and followed him over the scree of the creek bed, mincing and cursing as he went. The creek was waist-deep at best and they were swimming in name only, but it was hot and the water was cool and that, today, was enough. At any rate, Dick had goosebumps, and when Lew swanned up beside him and slapped a wet hand around his waist he flinched.

"Chilly?"

"Feels good," Dick said. "It'll be hot in the house tonight."

"We can rinse off before bed. No funny business, though. Too sweaty."

Dick made a face. It was all well and good to roll around together the first warm night of the season, to revel in the slip and stick of skin, to fall asleep naked to the open window and let the perspiration cool you as it dried. But by the middle of July, there was nothing attractive about sharing a bed. Lew ran hot and caught hell for it from Dick all summer long; in the middle of the night sometimes he slid close to spoon and even unconscious Dick would groan and wriggle away.

Now Dick groaned again and sat down in the creek. "The house in New Jersey was air conditioned," he said, sounding forlorn.

"The house in New Jersey was in New Jersey," said Lew matter-of-factly, lowering himself into the water. "And we didn't want to be there anymore."

Dick opened his mouth as if to reply, but he seemed to think better of it. He shook his head instead and looked away into the woods, where pillars of light seeped down through the trees. Lew liked their house up on the hill, but liked the woodland houses too, the old stone barns they saw from the car tucked off the roads and shining like jewels when the sun came through in the late afternoon.

Dick sighed and lay back, floating skyward. His body made an archipelago. His face, his belly, the tops of his thighs. He dunked his head and sat upright again, tossing his hair like the dog did after a bath.

They stayed in the water awhile longer, talking about nothing, about the fence Dick had fixed and about which of the horses would have figured it out first (Tulip, they decided, and she would have sent Caliban out on reconnaissance.) They talked about taking a trip later in the season, about hiring a local kid to feed the horses and going to the city or the beach.

"Someplace I can take you out," Lew said.

Dick smiled ruefully. "You can take me out anywhere."

"You know what I mean."

With that, Lew stood up. The sun had dipped below the treeline and he wanted a little sun, though logic and the mercury held that he'd be missing the chill soon enough. He waded out, laid his undershirt out on the big rock and sat on it. Dick watched him from the water, arms wheeling slowly in a stationary breaststroke.

"We could always go back to Chicago," Dick said.

Lew looked down at the rock and smiled. That was a platitude, for now at least. Dick might be convinced to swing a weekend away, something in driving distance, but Chicago was out of the question now that Dick had the business, that caterpillar of a project he nursed week in and week out. Lew should have been gladder of it; he rested easier knowing Dick had something to occupy his time. Lew didn't know the first thing about agriculture, and as such his contribution to the whole enterprise consisted primarily of writing checks and nodding interestedly as Dick soliloquized about cattle feed.

"You don't have to sell me on this, you know," he'd told Dick once.

"You're a partner," Dick said, sounding a little like he was reading from one of his textbooks. "I'm trying to be transparent."

"I'm all right with a little mystique where cows are concerned. But I'm happy to test any return on my investment if it comes in the form of a tenderloin."

The day Dick hired his first employee—a sunny, flaxen-haired secretary named Audrey who'd have been the crown jewel of any steno pool, not that Lew had noticed—they had a champagne toast. Lew had insisted. It was the first sip of alcohol he'd had in months, and he believed in getting back on the horse every so often.

"I'm not sure the same principle applies," Dick had said, watching him pour.

"Bullshit. What am I going to do for the rest of my life, Dick?"

"Abstain," Dick offered up lightly. Just for a second Lew wanted to hit him.

"Christ," Lew said, and drank.

But it hadn't been the same, and he felt like a heel draining his glass while Dick mimed sipping at his after the obligatory clink. So when he had finished he took Dick to bed in the name of distraction and abandoned the bottle to go flat on the kitchen counter overnight. The next morning he'd poured the remainder down the sink.

He'd wanted a drink that night, the occasion of the new hire an excuse murmured in his ear by a perching demon. He wanted a drink every night, and he wanted one now, the craving an urgent riptide in which you had to keep your feet, and woe betide the man who couldn't at least remember to swim parallel to the shoreline.

He turned his face up to the ebbing sun, shut his eyes and listened to the waterlogged sounds of Dick clambering from the creek. Presently the glare behind his eyelids was blotted out, and without looking he put a hand out and met Dick's clammy thigh. Lew moved forward and slid his hand down to the back of Dick's knee, to his calf. He laid his cheek against Dick's hip, and the way Dick shifted from foot to foot and his sharp intake of breath told Lew everything he needed to know.

He took Dick into his mouth as casually as he might sling an arm around his shoulders, the way he'd take his hand later when they walked back up to the house. These were the spoils of a dozen years, he guessed: a simple physical frankness that still struck him sideways on occasion. Dick sighed and slid his fingers into Lew’s hair. Their pace was none at all, technique unstudied in the manner of the long-practiced. Lew moved gesturally as a painter, a poet who'd long since given up on grammar. In any case it was enough, and maybe that too was down to familiarity, because it seemed like no time at all before Dick made a noise in the back of his throat, tightened his grip and stuttered Lew’s name.

Lew swallowed carefully and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He sat a minute, Dick's hand soft now on the top of his head. Then he got creakily to his feet, reaching again, and again he found Dick like a lax vine finds a stake. Dick had a blank, dozy look on his face that Lew was inclined to consider a victory, particularly when Dick drew him close and kissed him deeply in what felt awfully like gratitude.

"You want—"

Lew shook his head, belatedly reminded of his own nakedness, his own obvious desire. "Later," he said. He kissed Dick's cheek. "If it's not too hot."

Dick gave him a quizzical look, and let his hand linger on Lew's hip. Lew felt sapped, by the heat, maybe, or by the mental effort of redirection. It had worked, though; he felt less jittery, less enamored of a neat whiskey.

They got dressed, Dick still watching him carefully as he tugged his trousers on over damp legs one at a time. Lew pretended not to notice him looking, and when they had their pants and shoes back on he slung his wet t-shirt over one shoulder and waited for Dick so they could cut back through the woods to the now-intact fenceline. Buster came bounding up at the edge of the field, barking insistently, a pied blur between them.

"Settle down," Lew said. He reached for the dog but he ducked out of range and barked again and again, throaty and wild.

Dick stepped up close and nudged Lew with his shoulder. "What's up with him, you think?"

"Who knows. Got into some carcass he's dying to tell us about. Or else he snagged a rabbit. That always gives him a big head for a day or two."

Dick laughed. "It does."

"For a hound, you'd think he'd be a little more adept," Lew said.

"Cut him some slack," said Dick. "He's only half."

"Thank God. I don't think I could take any more than fifty percent."

He was a good dog, though hard-headed and possibly not the brightest. He was loud in the manner of hounds, and did what he pleased, often lighting out across the field in the mornings in hot pursuit of something or other and limping back at dusk self-satisfied and hungry and riddled with ticks. He had a bed on the porch in the summer and a doghouse he liked when the weather turned chilly, but he was in the house more often than not, sprawled across their laps on the couch of an evening, Dick picking burrs from his coat and paws with the utmost care.

They'd got him as a puppy on their very first drive up to the farm, back when they were only toying with the idea of moving out of the house in Nixon. A couple of kids had posted up by the side of the road, allowed to contribute a roiling cardboard box of puppies to the neighbors' farm stand. They pulled over for Jersey corn, but looking back Lew was pretty sure that had been pure pretense. He remembered paying for the corn and a punnet of strawberries and then there was Dick out of the corner of his eye, covered in squeaking balls of black-and-white fur and being suckered but good by a pair of savvy fifth-graders. The puppies were supposed to be free, but as Lew recalled money had almost certainly changed hands. Knowing Dick he'd made them promise to sock it away for college.

They'd made the rest of the drive with a nascent Buster squirming on Dick's lap, and by the time they arrived at the little farmhouse on the top of the hill there seemed no choice but to make it theirs, for as Dick said, eyes wondrously wide as if Buster had been a human baby: “Look at these paws, Nix. He'll be sixty pounds at least. What are we going to do with him in town?”

There was something about the barking that nagged at Lew, but by the time they'd picked up Dick's toolbox and paused once more to admire his work on the fence Buster seemed placated, and as they turned to walk back up the hill to the house he trotted beside them, tired from the day's ramblings. Dick had the toolbox under one arm and his free hand in Lew's, the way he'd imagined earlier. It was getting on for evening, and it would be warm but pleasant, and maybe they'd eat out on the porch, leave aside the table and the place settings and sit down on the steps with their plates.

Dick stopped three-quarters of the way across the field. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Who's who?"

"There's somebody up at the house. Can't you see them sitting on the porch?"

"Huh," said Lew.

Dick dropped Lew’s hand, and it was this that bothered him more than the fact of the visitor. 

People didn't often come to see them; Dick had a guy come out sometimes to fix things he couldn't or didn't have time for, and to look after the horses when they were gone. What he thought of the two of them Lew couldn't say; he steered clear, and in fact wasn't entirely certain he'd ever gotten a good look at the guy's face. They went into town together sometimes to the brace of rooms above the laundromat that served as Dick's office, and to the grocer's, to the feed store and the post office. Once in a blue moon they went to the movies, a seat between them if there was room and all the better if there wasn't, knees knocking and hands brushing in the tub of popcorn like teenagers. Dick went to his parents' at Christmas, and if he didn't go to his sister's Lew usually split a roast chicken with the dog and knocked off early, lulled by Bing Crosby on the record player. A lonesome life, maybe, but not precisely lonely. 

Harry'd come once, and that had been a lark. Dick and Lew been cagey at first, but Harry had seemed entirely unperturbed by the fact of their cohabitation or Lew's new-found abstemiousness. He'd gotten rip-roaring drunk that first night all by himself and spent the rest of his visit too subdued by a hangover to care about much of anything. 

The second evening the two of them sat on the porch, watching Dick throw a ball for the dog. Harry had dragged himself outside wearing only a pair of PT shorts (“Ancient relics!” he’d crowed delightedly) and an undershirt. 

“Jesus Christ, Welsh,” Lew said. “You’re shameless, letting it all hang out the second you’re flying solo. If only Kitty could see you now.” 

“Go to hell,” said Harry cheerfully. “Say, how about some hair of the dog?” 

Lew fetched them a couple of beers from the icebox and they sat around smoking. His was mostly for show. He took a long draw and then set the bottle down, finished one cigarette and then another. He wasn’t much for beer anyway, made his guts feel as though they were washing around inside of him, but Harry was as indiscriminate with drink as he was with food and was buzzed again in short order.

“You know, you I get,” Harry said presently, gesturing at Lew with the neck of his bottle. “But him? He’s a mystery to me.” He tossed his head in the direction of the yard. Dick had paused the game of fetch to weed a couple of stragglers in the tomato beds. He was barefoot in the black earth, bent over. Outside the chickenwire Buster was pacing impatiently, loudly demonstrating his dissatisfaction with Dick’s inattention. 

Lew took another sip of his beer. The longer he went without drinking heavily the more he missed it as a prop. Even here with Harry, who’d seen him as close to his worst as anyone save Dick, he wanted something to do with his hands. He set the beer down again and fiddled with the bottlecap. 

“What are you talking about?” he asked. 

“Come on. You can’t tell me you’re not at least a little surprised he’s still a bachelor. You couldn’t get him married off before the plant closed, to some dame in the typing pool?” 

“No such luck.” 

“Damn,” Harry said. 

“You trying to tell me something, Harry?” 

Harry laughed. If Lew had been paying attention he might’ve thought it a little too loud, but he wasn’t, instead all wrapped up in a mixture of alarm and offense and the soreness that came from someone prodding too close to your tender underbelly. 

“Look, just--don’t let him get too comfortable,” Harry said. “He oughtta--” 

“What?”

“He oughtta have somebody,” Harry said.

Lew snapped his head around to look at him. He’d reddened, and he was busily scratching at his nose as if he’d rather Lew not see. A silence fell that felt deafeningly long, during which Lew felt rather like he’d had the pinked metal edge of the bottlecap pressed into the meat of his heart. 

Finally he scoffed, and threw the cap at Harry. “Not too worried about me, are you? I’m hurt. And anyway, when have you known him to get comfortable? Just look at him.” Out in the garden Dick stood up, dragged the back of his hand across his brow. “I think he’s allergic.” 

***

"Who do you think it is?" Dick asked.

"Dunno. Can you see a car?"

"I don't think so."

"Maybe they're lost," Lew said.

"Could be."

Lew crunched through a particularly dry patch of grass, scaring up a locust the length of his pinky finger. "Maybe it's a singing telegram."

"Maybe," Dick said, distantly enough that Lew could tell he wasn't quite listening. Buster was beginning to act cagey again, darting out ahead of them and then looping back, giving a testy sort of huff Lew had never heard before. On they walked, because there was nothing for it but to go and see who it was. They didn't talk. Already this unknown third party had changed the course of the day. Lew couldn't help but wonder if it was better or worse that night was coming on now. The figure came into better view, resolving from a soft smudge into a girl in a dress, its full skirt cloudy against the white of the house and what blue was left in the easterly summer sky.

When they came into shouting distance several things happened at once. First, Dick waved. The girl raised a tentative hand in answer, and just as Lew was about to say something Buster took off like a shot, making straight for the porch.

"Dammit," muttered Dick, and went after him at a run. Lew felt obliged to follow self-consciously, for he hadn't quite kept himself up the way Dick had and would thus arrive at the porch out of breath and all the worse to meet whoever it was.

In hindsight the whole episode would seem farcical, but at the time there had been a distinct air of potential horror, the unrelenting sense that things could and would go badly wrong. The girl cowered on the threshold of the farmhouse, both hands held out before her as if to ward something off. "Something" was quite unmistakably Buster, teeth bared, growling and carrying on in a manner that might have been admirable had the interloper been slightly more forbidding but was, as things stood, just plain embarrassing. Mortifying, really, because the girl Buster had treed on the porch happened to be Lew’s daughter. She looked as if she was trying very valiantly not to cry.

"Betsy?" he called, incredulous. He thought he must be imagining things. "What are you—oh, Jesus Christ, Buster, _stop it_." He reached the dog and yanked hard on his collar. "Get out of here."

Buster looked to Dick, undoubtedly expecting the good cop half of the act, but Dick just jerked his head in the direction of the doghouse. "Get," he said, watching Buster trot out of view, stung, his tail between his legs.

"I'm sorry," Dick said. "He's—he's never done that before."

Betsy drew a shuddering breath. "It's all right," she said. "It's funny, I usually get along with dogs."

"He usually gets along with people," Lew said.

"Not a lot of people come up to the house," Dick said, nearly simultaneously.

Betsy looked between them like she couldn't decide who she ought to listen to. She crossed her arms over her chest. As she did Lew could see that the cotton at her armpits was grey with sweat. It was too bad, he thought. She looked as if she'd set out having done her best to dress for the heat. Now her dark hair hung limply around her face, her chin and the bridge of her nose greasy and shining. She was wearing a pair of sandals with big blue rosettes on the toes, covered in a film of dust from the drive. Beside her on the porch sat a small rolling suitcase, and something about the thought of her hauling it all the way up from the road depressed him. 

"What are you doing here?" Lew asked, voice sounding gruff to his own ears. "Is everything all right with your mother?"

She nodded slowly, as if considering what to say.

"Let's go in and talk," said Dick quickly. "I think we could all use a cold drink, huh?"

Abruptly Lew recalled the fact that neither of them were wearing shirts. He guessed it could have been worse. "We were fixing a fence," he offered, the non sequitur lobbed at their stilted conversation like a brick. Dick gave him an odd look, went up onto the porch and stepped around Betsy to open the door. He held it for her and she ducked inside first. Lew tried to catch his eye to convey the full force of his bemusement, but Dick either didn't see him or pretended not to, going into the house and leaving Lew no choice but to follow along after, feeling a little like the dog.

They trooped into the kitchen, Lew and Dick shrugging their shirts on as they went. Betsy hovered behind a chair and Lew did the same as though waiting for Dick's command. Dick turned and plucked a glass from the cabinet beside the sink, went to the icebox, popped a couple of cubes from the tray. It occurred to Lew that he should help, but moving seemed impossible. If he moved, if he did anything but watch Dick and hope to God he'd take the measure of the scene, he thought events might spiral madly out of control to ends he couldn't picture and didn't want to.

Dick filled the glass with water from the sink and set it on the table in front of Betsy. "Please," he said. "Sit."

He looked at Lew as he spoke, and so Lew sat too, pulling the chair before him back with a scrape that seemed terribly loud in the quiet kitchen. Dick poured him a glass of water, and that was cruel, wasn't it? The gnawing creature that skulked at the back of Lew's brain muttered all sorts of choice words about Dick then, about the irony of that good clear water when a few short years ago he'd have had what he really wanted and nobody to tell him differently. But that's the trouble with self-improvement. You're all of a sudden held accountable. He took a gulp of his water. From across the table Betsy did the same, and Dick watched them and cleared his throat. He didn't speak, and presently Lew realized Dick meant for him to do the talking.

He swallowed. He felt as though a frog had crawled up his windpipe. She was so old, he thought. He remembered seeing her for the first time after the war, all of four, and thinking how old she was. It was nothing now. Now she could see through him just as surely as any adult; now she might have a whole host of ideas about him, and most of them probably held weight. Lew didn't much flatter himself, particularly where family was concerned.

Abruptly the phone began to scream. To Lew's ears it sounded like an irate parrot, which wasn't too far off how he'd always thought of Kathy's shouting voice. Fitting, he thought.

"I'd bet money that's for you," Lew said. "Better get it over with, huh?"

Betsy paled. Lew felt an odd combination of sympathy and schadenfreude. Whatever her scheme had been, it had come abruptly to an end. He got the feeling that it must tied into some plan of Kathy's, and there was a certain immature pleasure to be had in jamming a spanner in those works. Lew had never laid claim to rationality where Kathy was concerned. He got up and answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"Is she there?" Kathy said.

"Hi," he said. "Been awhile, hasn't it?"

"Lewis, please," she said. "I haven't got time for this. Is she—is she there with you? And safe?" Kathy sounded a little harried and a lot pissed off, but not uncaring. He supposed that was a good sign.

"Sure, she's here," he said. "I think we're all a little up in the air, in terms of what exactly's happening. But she's fine. What's the hurry?" 

"Didn't she tell you? We're all going to France. We sail tonight; I've got to leave for the ship in an hour."

"Well, I hate to break it to you, but I'm not sure she can make it from Pennsylvania to New York Harbor in an hour."

Kathy sighed. "Call your sister," she said. "Blanche will just have to take her. I thought she was with Blanche already, and then here I am looking like a fool while she goes on and on about how lovely it is that Betsy and her father are finally going to have a nice long visit."

Lew was getting a headache. He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. It didn't help. "Long visit, huh? How long's long?" He stared pointedly at Betsy, who became suddenly preoccupied with a hangnail. Meanwhile Dick was watching him, expression unreadable.

"We're gone six weeks," Kathy said. "Paris and then down to Cannes. Blanche has the names of the hotels. But don't worry about it, Lew. Put her on a train back to the city. I'll reimburse you for the ticket and she'll be out of your hair."

"I think I can spring for a goddamn train ticket," Lew said, irritated.

"Well, I'm telling you you don't have to," Kathy said. "But suit yourself. And I'm sorry for the trouble, really I am. Listen, put her on the phone, would you?"

"Yeah, sure. But hey, Kathy—"

"What?"

He sighed. "Nothing."

He held the phone out to Betsy. "She wants to talk to you."

"Great," muttered Betsy. Lew saw the corner of Dick's mouth twitch.

She slid from her chair and slunk around the table. She didn't meet Lew's eyes as he handed her the telephone. At first he stood beside her before beginning to feel extraneous, the odd impulse to defend her from Kathy's inevitable ire warring with the realization that she didn't need defending, not really; he ought to go and sit back down. He did, taking her seat next to Dick. Dick gave him a measured look and slid his foot along the floor to nudge Lew's.

Betsy had turned away from them. Lew could just hear Kathy down the phone, her voice tinny, fast and furious, Betsy shaking her head frantically as though her mother could see her.

"But I—" she started. "Yes. No. No, Mother, I only meant that—all right. All right, I will. I said, I will!" She sighed angrily into the receiver.

He remembered when he'd fought with Kathy over the phone, a few choice conversations back at Toccoa and before, some of which Dick had borne unfortunate witness to. He'd huffed into the phone then, and it had driven her crazy. There it was again, that childish glee at the way he'd always been able to irk her like a splinter, the kind you couldn't get a decent grip on with tweezers.

"Goodbye," said Betsy, and slammed the receiver back into its cradle. "Sorry," she said. She stalked over to the empty chair and flung herself into it with a theatricality Lew couldn't help but recognize.

"She pissed?" he asked.

"Lew," Dick said. Lew kicked him under the table.

"Yeah," said Betsy. "I guess I have to call Aunt Blanche in a minute and explain."

"How did you get here, anyway?"

"I took the train," she said, as though it should've been obvious. "And then I took a taxi from the station. Aunt Blanche gave me your address. I mean I guess I had it," she said. "From, um. Christmas cards and things. But I called her and she read it to me from her address book just to be sure."

She looked up at Dick. "She said he lived with a friend," she offered, and something cold clutched Lew about the guts.

Dick laughed, a dissembling, disarming laugh. "You know, you and I have met. But it was a long time ago. You probably don't remember."

She laughed herself. "I don't," she said. "But I might as well. The time I went to visit Dad and skinned both my knees. Mother went on and on about it."

"A cautionary tale, I guess," Lew said. "Yeah, Dick was there. He helped patch you up, didn't you?"

"I went to look for Band-Aids," Dick said. "As I recall, there weren't any, and you weren't happy about it."

"I had a scar on one knee for awhile," said Betsy, swinging her legs out from under the table. She pushed the hem of her skirt up and prodded at her skin. "Huh, I suppose it's faded. Mother used to make an awful fuss over it. I always thought it made me look tough."

She kept her gaze trained on the floor. She traced a figure eight on the hardwood with the toe of her sandal. Dick watched the wall over Lew's shoulder, and Lew wondered what precisely he was thinking. The clock ticked, far too loudly.

Lew sighed. "Betsy—"

"Don't make me go back," she said in a rush. "Please."

"Look, I'm sorry, but—"

"First things first," Dick cut in. He looked at Betsy, and Lew was reminded of the way he always used to talk to the men when one or another of them had gone a little squirrelly. "Why exactly are you here and not in New York?"

"Mother and I got into an argument," she said. Two spots of pink came up in her cheeks as she talked; she seemed as if she was building to something. "We used to go to Paris just the two of us, you know? And then she married Robert and had the twins and we didn't go at all anymore. And then we went last summer and it was ghastly. So we got in a fight—she was sore I hadn't packed yet. Anyway, I got mad and told her I wasn't about to go along and play au pair like I did last summer, so she could just forget it, and she told me if I didn't like it I could stay behind. So I packed my bag and left. She didn't think I'd do it, but did." She took a deep breath, let it out like she'd just come up from under water.

"When was this?" Lew asked.

"This morning," she said. "I phoned Aunt Blanche from the lobby downstairs. If I told her the truth she'd have made me go to France with Mother. So I phoned her up and said I'd arranged to come and see you instead, and could I have the address because I had an early train and couldn't get you on the phone."

"She didn't think that was a little fishy?"

"I don't think she was paying much attention," Betsy said. "She was getting ready to go out."

Lew ran a hand back through his hair. "You, uh. You really meant to come here? Because if there was somewhere else…" He was thinking of a boy, or of a girl-friend Kathy disapproved of.

She shrugged. "I didn't know where else to go," she said. "I wasn't thinking straight. I'm sorry. It was a dumb idea."

"Not dumb," said Dick. "A little hasty, maybe, but not dumb. Right, Nix?"

"Yeah," said Lew. "Right."

They sat in silence awhile, broken only when Betsy's stomach growled. She colored and clutched at herself, and Dick laughed again in that soft way he had that somehow made it perfectly clear he was laughing with and not at you.

"Well, that settles it," Dick said. "Dinnertime. There's a bathroom through there if you want to wash up, Betsy. And it's too bad we're only having leftovers; your dad's a mean cook."

"Really?"

"No kidding. I'll take your suitcase through to the sitting room, huh?"

"Thanks," she said tentatively. "I'll just go and wash my hands." She got up from the table and slipped out the kitchen door. A moment later Lew heard the faint whine of the bathroom door swinging open and the rush of the sink coming on.

He turned to Dick. "Jesus Christ," he said in a stage whisper. But Dick wouldn't play; he gave Lew a look that said _we'll talk about this later_. Beyond forestalling Lew's inevitable maelstrom his own opinion of events remained a mystery. One thing was certain, though: the evening would be so far from Lew's earlier quotidian imaginings as to be unrecognizable. And that was too bad, really. Surprise houseguests aside, he'd been looking forward to giving Dick a reason to bitch about the heat.

He made himself busy setting out the dish of chicken and slicing up a loaf of bread. For all his elaborate experiments he still liked simple food; he remembered the little pub in Aldbourne they'd always gone to, the ploughman's lunch of bread and hard cheese and pickled onions. Dick set the table, and just as it was occurring to Lew that Betsy had been gone an awfully long time she came back into the kitchen, hair pulled back in a messy bun. Her eyes were red.

He cleared his throat. "Nothing fancy," he said, indicating the chicken. "Help yourself."

They made sandwiches and sat at the table and ate. Betsy had two, stuffed with a copious amount of leftover lemon chicken, and as Lew watched her eat he felt the faint glow of something curiously like pride. As he ate his own meal, sipped at the perennial glass of milk, he realized that he felt exhausted, his thoughts blunted by fatigue. Part of him was vaguely aware that this was something he ought to be concerned about, the three of them here together, that perhaps Lew's presence at Dick's table, in his home and in his life, required more explanation than they'd offered. But tonight the thought seemed far too daunting, and anyway Betsy looked just as beat as he felt. By the time they were finished she'd chewed an oatmeal cookie listlessly and refused an offer of coffee, and they were faced with the issue of sleeping arrangements.

"We'll make up the couch," Lew said, surveying the living room. "Just gimme a minute. Go up and take a shower if you want; I'll find you a pillow and blanket."

Betsy nodded and sat down to wait. She dragged her suitcase up beside her as if to get out her pajamas, but she didn't get much further. She seemed subdued. They'd decided over dinner that they'd call Blanche in the morning; Betsy would go back to the city on an afternoon train. Lew felt no small measure of relief at the thought, and at this point in his life he only felt a little bad about it. For they'd all cast their lot, hadn't they, him and Betsy and Kathy? Lew was no father, and whatever summer sojourn Betsy had imagined would surely have been a disappointment at best. Better she go back to New York and get on with it. Maybe she'd change her mind and sail to Europe after all. They were mutable, teenagers, or so he'd heard.

He went upstairs and got a quilt out of the linen closet, slid a spare pillow into its case. He considered simply taking one off of their bed, but something about it struck him as wrong, inappropriately intimate, as if she might find them out by touch alone, pressing her cheek to the cotton like a clairvoyant.

He thought he might hear them come up after him, Dick showing her the upstairs bathroom with all its quirks, the way you had to turn the knobs just so and wait an eternity for the water to turn warm. Dick was impatient, and half the time he couldn't be bothered, took his showers cold instead. But Betsy didn't come up, and neither did Dick. Presently Lew tucked the quilt and pillow under his arm and went downstairs again.

He found her curled on the couch, hands tucked beneath her head, sound asleep. She still had one shoe on. Dick was sitting in his armchair with a book on his lap. "She didn't quite manage goodnight," he said. "But it's the thought that counts."

Lew slid the lone shoe off and spread the blanket over her. "She can kick it off if she gets too hot, I guess. And anyway, it's cooler down here."

"I opened the windows."

Lew sighed, came and perched on the arm of Dick's chair. To be so close in company might have been thrilling once, but there was a sobriety to the air now to match Lew's own cursed clarity of thought.

"Remember how she fell asleep on the couch before?"

"Yeah," said Dick softly. "I do." He leaned his head against Lew's arm. "She looks younger like this, huh. More like that day."

"I don't know what she was thinking of," Lew said. "I feel like I ought to apologize."

"What, to me? You couldn't have known she'd come here. Who'd have thought of it? Kathy didn't."

"No," Lew said. "This was the last place Kathy thought she'd go."

They sat there a minute, watching her. She still had some of that same softness she'd had as a child, a roundness to her cheek, to the flesh of her arm.

He thought of her eyes when she'd come out of the bathroom before dinner, and was struck suddenly by a memory, no less gripping for its timeworn blur. He remembered sleeping over away from home, at friends of his parents', a couple with a boy a year or so older than Lew. Both sets of parents had looked at the age difference from the comfortable hindsight of middle adulthood, having apparently forgotten that segment of one's youth in which a grade or two apart may as well be a decade. The boy had been just as unenthused at shepherding 11-year-old Lew as vice versa, and Lew recalled an evening spent perusing the boy's limited library before begging off early to lie in bed in the dark and pretend to be asleep. As he'd lain there staring up at the ceiling he remembered being seized by a rolling wave of desolation, by the thought that he was the only one left on Earth, and he'd hated everything and wanted his parents more than he could remember before or since.

He let Dick go out of the living room ahead of him. On his own way out Lew paused to draw the quilt over Betsy's bare shoulders. On impulse, he tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. They still had the same damn hair, he thought, dark and wavy, wilted in the heat and stuck to the side of your head. She was out of place here, just the way she had been at the old house the day she skinned her knees. He'd seen her since, of course, though mostly in passing. On Thanksgiving; at Christmas; when he made it up to see his sister. He sent her a card and a check every birthday. She sent him a school picture he changed out annually, wedged in the upper right corner of a framed family portrait, conveniently obliterating Kathy's face.

He found he liked to write Betsy's birthday checks. Having done so he could sit at his desk and feel accomplished. Just for a moment, maybe, but it was something. Tomorrow he'd see her off with a train ticket in hand and a little something in an envelope to get her by. He'd even drop her at the station himself, and then he'd drive home and say to Dick, well, that wasn't too bad, was it?

Satisfied, he turned the lamp off and felt his way upstairs in the brownish dark.

***

"I'm sorry," Lew said to his sister. "Could you say that again?"

Blanche made an exasperated noise over the phone. "You heard me the first time."

It was nine o'clock the next morning, and all their lives had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated. Lew could be forgiven an instance or two of selective hearing.

"Kathy said you'd take her," he said lamely, careful to keep his voice low. He peered around the wall into the kitchen, where Dick and Betsy were eating platefuls of scrambled eggs and toast. Betsy had her eyes trained on her plate, but Dick looked up and caught Lew looking. He raised a querulous brow.

"Kathy hoped I'd take her," Blanche said imperiously. "And Kathy's problem is that she assumes nobody else has a life to live. I love your daughter, I really do, but the fact of the matter is I'm going out to California with a friend for a fortnight, and I can't exactly take her along."

"A friend, huh? Doesn't he like kids?"

"From a distance," she said. "Like you, hmm?"

"Goddammit, Blanche," Lew said, irritation flagrant in his voice now. "What am I supposed to do?"

"She's sixteen, not an infant. You can manage a couple of weeks. Set Dick on the case. I'm sure he'll have plenty of ideas."

"Dick's got less experience than I do," Lew muttered.

"Well, whose fault is that?" Blanche said. The question was rhetorical, but it had the desired effect of stunning Lew into a silence Blanche could run roughshod over per usual.

There were times when he thought she'd known from the very first, the day she'd sprung into Dick's arms at the Waldorf as though they were long-lost friends. At the time Kathy had known more of Dick than Blanche had. Lew hadn't written his sister during the war, nor she him; they'd each relied on word of the other passed along and filtered through whichever channel was most convenient. Judging from how often that channel had been Kathy, Lew was frequently struck down with shock that Blanche hadn't come out on the other side of the war hating him as much as Kathy did.

So she'd been kind to Dick that night with their father when she didn't have to be. She'd been kinder still later on, when everything went to shit and then when it righted itself again. But she'd always been kindest to Lew, and he'd let it get to him just once. Once upon a time, when Dick had just come back from the Army for the second time, when Lew had been drinking especially destructively and Dick had finally taken it upon himself to be dissatisfied with proceedings, Lew had gotten it into his head that Dick ought to seek his fortunes farther afield. Meanwhile he would sit on his sofa or at his kitchen table or on the toilet or in his bed and drink whiskey he could no longer taste, hold his cup with hands that shook like an old man's, and as he did so he'd bemoan the fact his friend—no, not friend, that was a lie—his lover, his vibrant and scoutish and infuriating and beautiful lover should dare—DARE!— to look elsewhere, nevermind the fact that he did so under great duress and at Lew's own urging.

One night—the worst night—they'd gone out, to a dance in the city Blanche had conned them into attending. I'll meet you there, she said, because she always liked to have her own way out of things. She'll meet us there, he'd said to Dick, and Dick had stalled a minute, fiddling with a cufflink, and then he'd said, you know what, Lew, I think I will too.

He didn't think he would, was the worst part. He knew full well, and it was that fact Lew had kept ruminating on on the train into the city, sipping from his flask and muttering like a madman. Dick took a girl Lew knew from the plant, one of the secretaries. It'd have been more satisfying to say she was ugly, or vapid, or a bitch, but Lew couldn't have said she was any of those things, and Dick being Dick he was almost completely certain she wasn't. She was pretty, and smiled at him when they got to the dance, oblivious to the cyclone behind his eyes. Dick, who wasn't, smiled at Lew too, though considerably more apologetically. Then the two of them melted into the crowd. Lew sat at a table and drank and watched them as though thumbing ceaselessly at a bruise.

Eventually he looked up and noticed Blanche sitting at the table next to him. He hadn't seen her approach; absorbed as he was he hadn't even seen her sit down. She sat there in a halo of blue that lit her like a film star, beautiful and tragic. She was watching him watch Dick. Her expression was sad, and looking at her Lew knew immediately how transparent he must have been.

"Lewis," she said quietly.

It was the tone of her voice that did it, the way a child doesn’t cry until his mother asks _how are you?_ , voice velvety with promised comfort. He didn't say anything. He turned and looked at her, and when he did he let all of it show on his face. She stared at him, mouth a little open, and the damnedest thing was that she didn't look surprised at all, just sorry.

"Lewis," she murmured again, and oh, he was a wreck; he was a hairsbreadth from putting his head in her lap right there in the middle of everything.

"What?" he croaked.

When he spoke to her it was as if he'd broken a spell. She dropped her solemn look right away, tossed her hair over her shoulder. "Nothing," she said archly. "I was just going to ask you for a cigarette."

They never talked about that night again, and even when things had come right between Dick and him again Lew didn't mention it to him. There seemed something very wrong about selling Dick out to Blanche without his knowledge or consent. Lew could do what he liked, and damn the consequences, which was the same piss-poor attitude by which he'd conducted himself all his life. But Dick…well, it was like Harry said, wasn’t it. Somewhere in the back of his mind Lew had always figured Dick deserved a shot with the sweet-faced secretaries of the world, if he wanted one. So he owed it to him not to let their secret slip, and barring that to carry on as if he hadn't.

But days passed, days on days on days, and Lew drank himself half to death and at last decided he'd had enough already, and when he was sick as a dog and steadfastly refusing an audience with either a doctor or Blanche's analyst friend— "A protégé of Freud, Lewis, don't be dense"—Blanche heaved a put-upon sigh and told him to put Dick on the phone. Dick had accepted the receiver with a guarded look, cradled it against his face and slipped guiltily around the doorframe so he and Blanche could discuss Lew’s myriad failings in relative privacy.

But a funny thing had happened: Dick hadn't said a word. He'd gone quiet, said _uh-huh_ at intervals. He looked in at Lew, who pretended to have fallen asleep, and from beneath his heavy, crusty eyelids he saw Dick wipe at his eyes with the heel of his hand. Then he was speaking, whispering something to Blanche Lew couldn't quite make out. His feint got the best of him eventually and he really did drift off. Dick's mumbling seemed to grow louder, and Lew found himself half-dreaming, wondering idly as he did what Dick could possibly have to thank Blanche for, and who this lucky guy was he was claiming so earnestly to love.

On the telephone now Blanche was just as proclamative as ever. "Give it a day or two," she said. "She'll be so bored she'll be begging you to wire Kathy and get her a ticket to Paris. You'll see."

Her blasé confidence set Lew's teeth on edge the way Kathy had when she'd offered to pay for Betsy's train ticket. He had to get off the line, he decided, before he started arguing in favor of the farm. There was nothing for it, for the moment anyway.

"Thanks for all your help, Blanche," he said. "I hope your trip out west is just _lovely_."

"You're welcome, darling. I'll be sure and send the three of you a postcard."

"Oh, go to hell."

"Pardon me?"

Blanche had hung up, and Lew was currently cursing at the operator. "Sorry, sorry," he said. He set the phone back on the hook. "Dammit," he said under his breath. "Dammit, dammit." Then: "Dick!" he called. "C'mere a minute, would you?"

Dick ducked around the corner with an alacrity that said he'd been waiting for Lew to call him in, probably since he'd gotten on the phone in the first place. "What is it?" he asked. Something told Lew he already had an idea.

"She can't stay with Blanche," Lew said. "She's taking a trip, and it's not exactly a family vacation."

"Okay," Dick said, absorbing this new information with the same grace he had casualties, transfers, paltry supply lists. "So she'll stay here a couple of weeks. That's what she wanted anyway, isn't it?"

"Sure, but—look, think about what you're saying a minute." He looked at Dick pointedly. His calm bothered Lew, as though Dick thought less of him for being perturbed. 

Dick sighed. "It's just a couple of weeks," he said.

Lew rolled his eyes and peered into the kitchen. Betsy was chasing a scrap of egg around the perimeter of her plate. He couldn't assume she wasn't listening—hell, he'd have listened too. 

"Where'll she sleep?" he muttered.

"In the guest room," Dick said, as though it should be obvious.

"We haven't got a guest room." There was a second bedroom, sure, but it wasn't actually fit for guests, containing as it did a mattress hemmed in by boxes of books Lew had moved from the house in Nixon and never bothered to unpack.

"Is—is everything all right?" Betsy had come around the table, the three of them now standing in a decidedly awkward little triangle. She had her arms crossed over her chest again.

"Yeah," Dick said, looking expectantly at Lew, who was beginning to sweat. Wasn't this heat supposed to break, he wondered? Any fucking time.

Lew took a deep breath. "Looks like there's been a bit of a mixup with your aunt. You're going to have to bunk here awhile."

Her eyes widened. She looked as if she wasn't sure whether or not to let on that she was pleased. She was looking between Lew and Dick, but then she caught Dick's eye and kept it. "Is—is that okay?"

Lew found himself annoyed by the way she asked, as meekly as though she hadn't just turned up on the doorstep yesterday and made permission moot. Dick was smiling at her reassuringly, which only served to annoy him further.

"Sure it is," Dick said. "We were just talking over where you ought to sleep. My room's not the biggest—"

"Oh, I couldn't," Betsy said.

"—Which is what I was just telling him," Lew said. "It's your house, Dick. I'll take the couch and put her up in my room."

Which was their room, he thought, in slight hysterics. So he'd consigned them to a couple weeks of Dick shoved in a closet and him on the living room sofa, respectively. Not bad for a Sunday morning. He'd made bigger messes of things in shorter periods of time, but these days he was out of practice.

Dick just looked at him placidly, pale lashes lending his eyes an ungulate look. Like a cow, Lew thought uncharitably. A pretty cow, mind; a Charolais, or a Jersey. But still. "That'll be fine," Dick said, and Lew smiled because he didn't have a choice and because he wanted, just a little bit, to walk back into the kitchen and sweep his mug of coffee off the table.

"You sure it's okay?" That was Betsy asking, her voice high and pretty like a bird's. "Dad?"

"Huh?"

"Are you sure you don't mind?"

"Of course not," Lew said. "But it's Dick you should be asking. Like I said, it's his house." He moved around Betsy back into the kitchen. "Anyone for more coffee?"

"Not me," said Dick. "I've got to go and get ready for church."

"Oh," said Betsy. "What sort of church is it?"

"Episcopal. You must have seen it in the taxi, little grey stone building on the main street?"

Lew wasn't certain he could pick Dick's church out of a lineup, and was glad he'd never be called upon to do so.

Betsy grinned. "I did," she said. "It's a lovely building. That old cemetery spilling out over the hillside behind it? Say, Mr. Winters—"

"Dick," said Dick.

"Dick. Do you think I could come with you?"

"Bets, maybe you should—"

Dick put a hand up. "Lew, it's fine," he said. "You're welcome to come," he said to Betsy. "Though I'll warn you, it's not the most sophisticated place."

She flushed, clearly pleased. "I don't mind. I'll go put something nicer on." She was wearing a blue short-sleeved dress and the same blue-trimmed sandals. She'd showered before breakfast and her hair was still damp, limp in the humidity.

"I think that'll be fine," Dick said, giving her a once-over that reminded Lew of a barracks inspection, the way Dick would see some things and unsee others, depending. "Unsophisticated, remember?" He directed this last at Lew, who would have taken full advantage of the setup in private but under the circumstances had missed it altogether.

"Well," he managed, "I guess I'll sort the bedroom out while the two of you are gone."

He went into the kitchen and swiped his mug from the table, picked up his plate and set it in the sink. He dropped neither of them, for which he thought he deserved a commendation. He refilled his coffee and took a sip. Lukewarm by now, which figured. Not too long ago he'd have doctored it until it regained its appeal, but that was out of the question now.

Dick appeared by his elbow, close enough that Betsy must have quit the room while Lew was moping over his coffee. "She's getting her purse," Dick said. "You don't mind?"

"Ha. Why should I mind? It's entirely wholesome and not at all strange, my daughter and my—whatever you are going off to church together. "

"Nix," Dick said.

"No, I mean it. And I meant it about the room. I've got to fix yours up too so you're not sleeping in a crawlspace."

"I really will take the couch," Dick said. "Or we can switch off."

"I don't much care where I sleep, Dick." He turned and grabbed for Dick's plate, dropped it into the sink from just enough of a height to yield a crash.

Dick gave a peeved sigh that said he had Lew's number and was unimpressed. "I'm going to go start up the truck," he said. "Send her out, would you?"

"Yeah, yeah."

Dick turned to go. As he did he reached out and whacked Lew on the arm. "Buck up, Lew. It'll be fine."

***

Lew spent the rest of the morning considering how best to contain the detritus of two commingled lives. It wasn't easy, and he cursed himself several times over for offering up the bedroom, for leaving the spare bedroom to lie fallow so long, for giving Blanche their address, for having the audacity to think he could father a child in the first place without bringing the whole planet down around all their ears. He took Dick's clothes from the closet and piled them on a forgotten chair in the second bedroom, and then he set about rearranging the boxes of books to make them less of a fortress, making up the sad mattress that would now be Dick's. Leaning across to tuck in the sheet he discovered a gnawed-out hole and a filthy handful of yellowish stuffing and cursed, vowing to shut the cat in up here awhile next time he found her in the house.

He was agitated and sweating by the time Dick and Betsy returned, and was so set on his task he'd nearly forgotten the impetus behind it in the first place. He was sitting on their bed wondering whether the room was sufficiently scrubbed free of evidence when Dick came in and shut the door carefully behind him.

"Hi," he said. He sat beside Lew, right up close so their legs were touching. Already the proximity felt illicit.

"How was church? Any profound life lessons I ought to incorporate?"

"Oh, I don't know. The sermon was on forgiveness, so take that however you like."

"Huh," Lew said.

Dick leaned in and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. "It really will be all right," he said.

"Watch it," Lew said. He shrugged away, the move only half teasing. "You forget yourself once out there and we'll be in real trouble."

Dick frowned. "You're the one who's always saying nobody pays attention," he said, looking down at his hands.

His cuticles were dry, flaking away from the bed of his thumbnail like paper. That was a rare bad habit of his: he picked at his cuticles, chewed like Betsy had earlier at the table. Lew would catch him at it and bat his hand away, or hold it if he was feeling sentimental.

"They don't pay attention," Lew said. "But most of the time they're not curious houseguests, either."

"How do you know she's curious? I should think by her standards we're pretty darn boring." He elbowed Lew softly in the ribs. "I mean, we're boring by your standards, so it stands to reason."

Lew huffed. "Trust me, if I was in her shoes I'd snoop from attic to floorboards. And anyway, when said that I wasn't talking about two fellows kissing."

Dick sighed. "You know—" he started.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking it seems like we’re more than two fellows kissing." He shook his head. He started in on one of his cuticles, managing to free up a bead of blood before Lew had the presence of mind to cluck at him.

"Stop that, would you?" He grabbed at Dick's hand, licked the flat of his thumb and wiped the blood away. "What've you done with Betsy?"

"She's sitting on the porch reading. It looks like rain."

Lew hadn't looked out a window in a couple of hours at least. "Hope it does," he said.

"Yeah, me too." Dick looked around the room as if seeing for the first time the subtle way he'd been excised. "You should've left the map up," he said, pointing to a newly bare place on the wall, where the paper was ever so slightly brighter. "She'd never know it wasn't yours, and that part of the wall looks funny, like there's supposed to be something there."

"That's because there is," Lew snapped. "Sorry. I can go get it and put it back. I'll show you your room, that's where I stuck everything."

"Great," said Dick, because it wasn't.

They went in and sat on Dick's bed then, and Lew decided it looked a little better having gone and come back to look with fresh eyes. "Sorry about your stuff," Lew said, nodding at the chair.

"I'll live. Just don't let Betsy see inside; she'll think I'm an awful slob."

"Well, we can't have that."

They went downstairs and Lew made them sandwiches for lunch with the last of the chicken, chopped this time with sweet pickles and mayonnaise.

"Cut up some of those strawberries, will you?" he said, and so he and Dick stood together at the counter while Betsy sat at the kitchen table with her book and watched them.

As they finished the rain started up, loamy air blowing through the screen door first, then a drop or two on the kitchen window and then at last a furious pelting. There was a kind of relief in it, thought Lew, as if the earth and sky were gasping. He'd never noticed that before he moved out here with Dick. A great thunderclap split the polite quiet. It was suddenly dark as twilight; Dick got up to turn a lamp on and was nearly upended by a soggy Buster, who'd gotten the door open with his nose.

"Oh, poor thing," laughed Betsy, leaning down to pat him on the head. "Were you frightened?"

"I see you two have made up," Lew asked.

"I get along with dogs," she said, looking at Buster fondly as he he trotted into the living room and flung himself onto the hardwoods. "And anyway, it wasn't his fault. He was just doing his job, wasn't he."

"You guys have one?"

She shook her head. "After old Toby died Mother said she was finished with animals," she said. "But I think she misses him sometimes. She talks about him."

"He was a good dog," Lew said. "Your mom treated him like a real baby. I used to tease her about it. We got him at Christmas and she made him wear this ridiculous bow, this green and red plaid…thing."

He gestured about his neck and Betsy giggled. Truth be told, he remembered Toby's puppyhood more clearly than he remembered Betsy as a baby, the way they'd housebroken him on flattened old copies of the Times, the way Lew had gotten up in the night for something or other, drunk, and ended up with cold dog shit between his toes. Kathy'd laughed and laughed, and in those days he'd laughed too. 

"I wish we'd get another one. Maybe when the twins are older."

At the mention of her stepbrothers Betsy went quiet. Outside the thunder growled, rolling and tympanic. Dick got up again and cleared the plates.

***

Lew lay in the dark on the sofa, watching the rain against the window in the mercury glow of the porchlight. He was alone. The dog had lasted a good twenty minutes draped over his lower legs before Lew shifted one too many times to stave off pins and needles, and then he'd climbed off onto the floor with a sigh. Lew had read awhile, but now that the light was off he drifted, somewhere between comfortable and not. His feet hit the bottom arm; he wasn't overly tall but he didn't guess they'd ever thought seriously of the sofa as a spare bed for anyone other than perhaps Harry, who was short enough to skirt the issue even though he'd never think to complain in the first place.

Harry and Kitty lived in the same pretty house they'd come back to after their honeymoon, a rousing trip to Niagara Falls on which, per Harry, they'd only left the hotel room for meals and a trip out to the place the river fell away. Dick had asked about it once with provincial interest, and Harry had shrugged. It's misty, Dick. What else do you want? Besides, I wasn't looking at the damn waterfall.

"We should call them," he'd said to Dick just the other day. "How old's little Harry by now, nine?"

"Ten," Dick said, because he kept track. "Just had a birthday."

"Jesus," said Lew. "Time flies, huh?"

"You're telling me."

And Dick had laughed, eyes creasing deeper than they had once, unless Lew was imagining it. Sometimes he thought they both looked older; sometimes he looked in the mirror and prodded at himself, at places that were soft where they'd once been taut, and vice versa. But other times he'd think he was crazy, that they looked the way they always had, moved and bickered and fucked the way they always had. Well, maybe that last one was different, and that was okay.

A creak from the staircase, the third step from the bottom bending under familiar weight. Lew was roused and smiling before Dick made it to the living room. What a sap you are, he thought. It's probably the rain.

"What if she wakes up?" he asked when Dick got close enough to hear.

"She won't."

"She might."

"Not if you're quiet. Anyway, I just came down for a glass of water. Shove over, will you?"

"Glass of water, huh. So taxing you needed a breather on the way." He pressed against the back of the sofa, angling his body so that Dick could slip in alongside him back to front. The sofa was too narrow, their configuration nearly too precarious to be tenable, a good excuse to grab Dick around the waist, his skin soft and warm and for once uncloyed with sweat.

"Thank God it cooled off," said Lew. "I'm not sure I could take all this excitement at ninety degrees."

"Poor Nix." Dick exhaled, body sinking deeper against Lew as he did so. "You know, it's funny," he said.

"What is?"

"The way you talk to her. Talk about her. Half like she's a grown up and half like she's still in nursery school. I guess I keep thinking you'd gotten to know her better somewhere along the way."

Lew bristled. "You were with me all along the way. When d'you think I managed to sneak off and do that?"

"I don't know," Dick said with a sigh. "She was asking about you in the car."

"Great," Lew said.

"Nothing bad. Just little things. When you came down here, how we knew each other. Not—not like that," he added, as if he could read Lew’s thoughts. "You could tell she didn't mean anything by it. I think she just wanted to know."

"She must _know,_ " Lew said. "She sees Blanche all the time. And it's not as though she hasn't seen me. I mean she must've known when I moved out of Nixon, she—"

"She'd have been pretty young. I don't know, Lew. How well would you have kept track?"

Lew sighed. "You're starting to sound like Blanche."

"How do you figure?"

"Oh, most holidays she drinks too much and decides she's going to cure all our ills. She'd start with Dad, only he's dead, and Mom's in Palm Beach. So that leaves her with me and Betsy." 

"She ever make any headway?" Dick asked.

"What do you think?"

The usual course of events was: Blanche cried, and Lew got angry, and neither of them got any closer to curing anything. But by morning they'd have made up, Blanche cruising into the living room pretending nothing had happened at all. She'd usually make Lew cook her breakfast, kiss him on the cheek afterwards with greasy lips and say oh, Lewis, what would I do without you?

Dick didn't offer up what he thought, though it couldn't possibly have been less flattering than Lew's own opinion of himself as a father, which was barely any at all. Instead he drew a long breath and turned on the sofa so that he was facing Lew and could rest his head on his chest, tuck it up under his chin. Lew was once again seized by that tender feeling, the one that spread like a spill to crowd out everything else, and he thought to himself how lucky he was to have something to take up so much space, to preclude so handily less enjoyable and more difficult things.

When he quit the bottle he started loving Dick in a way that was as greedy and expansive as his drinking had been. He remembered that first morning, though it was only morning by virtue of being the time Lew dragged himself out of bed: he'd stumbled downstairs in the house in Nixon to find Dick at the kitchen table, no book or paper before him, just sitting, just staring. He looked as ill as Lew felt, and Lew knew—though he couldn't remember the particulars—that it had been an especially bad night. There'd probably been shouting, and maybe this time Dick had actually shouted back.

Now Dick was looking at him like a lost cause, his expression cairn-heavy, like a woodsman ready to memorialize some wild incidental tragedy, because he found himself there to bear witness, because nobody else would. And Lew realized then that Dick was right. He was as good as dead already, blood bubbling from his mouth and his breath beginning to rattle.

"You can't," Dick said. “Not anymore.” 

Lew took a deep breath. "I know." And that was the beginning of the end of it.

He let Dick take him back upstairs, watched him ignore the dank ruin of the bed and climb in alongside Lew anyway. He held fast when Lew began to shake and sweat, combed his hair back, cleaned him up when he puked runny yellow bile all over the sheets. And when Lew wanted to crawl out of his own skin, when he felt too sick to go on living and began to cry, to plead with Dick for just a finger of whiskey, when he begged Dick to make him feel something else, anything else, anything at all, Dick shushed him and held him down and fucked him carefully, medicinally. In retrospect it was the action of a man who had no idea what to do, but it made perfect sense to Lew at the time.

"There now," Dick muttered into the back of Lew's neck, as Lew mouthed the stained pillow beneath his cheek, rooting like an infant. "There you go, Nix."

They stayed in the bed for a week. Once or twice Dick moved Lew onto the couch to wash the sheets or into the bath to wash himself. Alcohol seeped ichorously from his pores. He couldn't eat, couldn't abide the thought of a cigarette. "We should call a doctor," Dick said, his hand on Lew’s sticky cheek.

"No," Lew said simply. "They won't let you stay with me. I want you to stay with me."

Dick sighed. He lay still a minute, then he rolled onto his back, crawled from the bed altogether and quit the room. Lew felt bereft, at once certain that that was it, that Dick had left for good. If he could've mustered the strength he'd have called after him, told him to go out into the street and flag down a car, to call for someone to come and put Lew out of his misery.

But Dick reappeared a few minutes later with a plate of toast. He set the plate next to Lew's face and sat down next to it on the bed. “If you can keep this down,” he said, “I won't call anyone.”

Lew ate the toast one bite at a time, and his stomach lurched and burned with acid, his heart beat like it would come out of his chest, but the toast stayed down. After that he could see Dick felt better, that he thought they'd turned a corner, and so, thought Lew, why not let it be true.

Once he was back on his feet he found that Dick had been busy. The wet bar in the sitting room now housed only a few flat bottles of tonic, and the pantry was entirely empty of liquor. He went upstairs and opened the cabinet beneath the sink and the boxes in his closet with the breathlessness of a lover only to find that Dick's purge was thorough indeed. Lew found himself embarrassed; there were things he hadn't known Dick knew, but if Dick judged him for his desperate dragon's hoard he never let on. But one morning a few weeks later, one morning that was actually a morning, he sat across from Lew at the kitchen table and asked him how he would feel about moving.

"What, you mean—away from here?"

He realized belatedly how incredulous he sounded and it made him laugh. For a prodigal son who'd staged his return with no small amount of _sturm und drang_ , he sounded awfully reluctant now.

Dick smiled hesitantly, as though he hadn't quite been sure how the suggestion would fly. He chewed on his lower lip. "It's just I think it might do us some good to get out of this house."

He looked off into the corner of the room, his eyes following the line of the wall up along the ceiling as though taking the measure of the space, as though the house itself might raise some objection.

"Us, huh," said Lew.

He was, as ever, ready with a facetious response, screwing it up like a pitcher's arm. But then he looked at Dick again, saw the way the thin skin beneath his eyes looked bruised, the way he looked simultaneously drawn and puffy, as if he wasn't sleeping or eating well.

"This house was always good to me," Dick said. "This town, the job. But the job's gone, Nix, and the house stopped being good to you a long time ago. Maybe even before we made it back."

He turned his face back to Lew, peered at him with that damned insightfulness. What he hadn't built up in the Army he'd perfected at the nitration works, and now that that was sold off Lew supposed Dick had no one left to figure out but him. Most of the time he managed not to resent it.

"Oh, definitely before then," he said. He was trying for flip, but judging by Dick's downturned mouth he'd missed by a mile.

Dick shook his head. "So let's get out of here."

"You're not done yet," Lew said, meaning at Rutgers, which if he thought about it too hard was liable to destroy him. Dick with a knapsack, packing a bag lunch and poring over textbooks into the wee hours.

"Well, I didn't mean today," Dick said, but he flushed happily, and that night they went back to the diner for the first time in a very long time, and Lew ate a hamburger that tasted better than anything he could remember, ate a slice of pie and most of Dick's. It was only when they came home and he'd digested a bit that he remembered that he wanted a drink, and tonight, at least, wanting that was easily exchanged for wanting Dick instead.

"I wonder if they'd give me their recipe for Dutch apple," Lew said before they fell asleep.

"You don't bake," Dick said.

Lew shrugged against the pillow. "I was thinking I might give it a try."

***

Monday morning saw Dick off to work and Lew and Betsy off to—well, that was the thing, wasn't it. Lew had had half a mind to beg Dick to take a day off, but he knew the request would be fruitless, and anyway he wasn't really inclined to beg. So the three of them had breakfast, during which Lew tried and failed not to dwell on the worrisome domesticity of the tableau, and then Dick took a thermos of coffee to go and went off to work. Lew invented some task to perform upstairs just on the off chance Dick lost his head and kissed him on the cheek to complete the picture. He didn't often feel like a housewife, but he did today, no less so when he took Betsy into town to go to the market. But hell, it was worse just loitering around the house wondering if he ought to initiate some sort of meaningful experience.

"I thought you and Mr. Winters worked together," she said, watching the countryside roll by outside the window. Lew's little MG zipped over the road, at the sort of effervescent pace he imagined Betsy was accustomed to on car rides.

"Jesus, call him Dick," said Lew. "If he were here he'd tell you to call him Dick."

"I thought you and Dick worked together."

"I'm more of an advisor, if you want to know the truth."

"Are you an investor? Robert's an investor. That's what he calls himself, at least."

Lew wasn't certain how to choose between accuracy and self-promotion. Clearly she didn't think much of investing with Robert as a model. "I guess," he said, feeling stymied. "They're all Dick's ideas, anyway. I help him out when he asks."

"Financially?"

He laughed at her baldness.

"Sure," he said. "Or however else he needs. We painted the office last summer. There was a family of squirrels in the roof; we flushed them out before he moved in. It was crazy, you should've heard them stampeding overhead all day. They pissed through the bead board onto a bunch of file folders."

"Dad!"

"Sorry."

He glanced over. She had a hand over her mouth. But behind it she was giggling, so Lew decided he'd probably come out all right compared to Robert.

At the Quality Market he thought to split up the shopping list, but she seemed more inclined to wander around with him instead, staring up and down the aisles as though at the zoo. Something occurred to him then, a little stab of recognition. She was a Nixon, after all; it might be in name only, but she'd grown up like he had anyway. "Have—have you been grocery shopping before?" he asked.

Her cheeks went pink. "Course I have," she said quickly, but she crossed her arms over her chest, a gesture he had begun to recognize as a nervous tell.

"I just wondered. Your mom always had the maid do it when we lived together," he said. "She cooked some of the time."

She nodded absently. "She still cooks some of the time. The boys have a nanny who makes their food but sometimes Mother cooks for me and Robert, if they're not going out." She sighed. "She makes good egg salad."

"You know, she does at that," said Lew. "Makes me want some."

Betsy smiled. "I can't believe you still remember her egg salad," she said.

"What can I say, I knew how to prioritize. Maybe if—" He stopped himself. He'd been about to say that maybe if he'd fallen a little further along on the scale of egg salad to true love things might have turned out differently, but at the last minute he decided it might be poor form to joke with her about it. 

"What do you want for dinner? If it's nice I guess we can grill out; keeps the kitchen cooler, though it's not as hot as it has been. You like steaks?"

"Sure," she said.

"We'll get some steaks. Remind me to get some corn at the farmstand on the way back. And eggs. I'll make us egg salad for lunch, huh?"

"Sure," she said. He didn't think she was listening.

They were in the freezer section and it was cold. She rubbed her bare arms, pale and covered in gooseflesh. If she'd gone to France she might've gotten a tan, though Lew tended to burn first and by the looks of things they had the same coloring, rosy in temperate weather and blotchy in the heat and the cold. In Austria he'd lain on the lakeshore one afternoon and fallen asleep, woken to a mean faceful of sunburn and white raccoon's eyes where his sunglasses had spared him. Dick had laughed and laughed, and said he might be a lobster but at least he was uniformly so.

At the cash register they took turns stacking groceries up to pay; Lew had chosen the shortest line without thinking, Betsy starting as they got up to the register and nearly dropping a bottle of milk.

"Oh," said the cashier, a sandy-haired, skinny kid around Betsy's age. "Hello there."

"Hi," she said.

"We met the other day," he said. "At church. It was…Betsy, right?"

She nodded. "Fred, wasn't it?"

"Sure is." He grinned, mouth full of pearly teeth. "You're Mr. Nixon," he said to Lew. "You drive that little MG. It's a real pleasure. I sure do love that car, sir."

Lew guessed that was as good a calling-card as any, so he offered the boy his hand. "Pleasure's all mine, Fred…"

"Olmstead," Fred said quickly. "You live up at the old Mills place," he supplied. "With Mr. Winters?"

Lew swallowed. "That's right."

"My dad's been meaning to call on him," Fred said, running his mouth a mile a minute with half an eye on the numbers, one stiff forefinger punching the numbers in the same pokey, nearsighted way Dick typed. "We've got the dairy, you know." He held up a milk bottle. "See? Olmstead's."

"Yeah," Lew said. "Well, Mr. Winters would be glad for the business. Tell your dad to give him a ring."

"I sure will. That'll be fourteen-forty," he said. "Let me just bag these up for you."

"Here, let me help," said Betsy, and she slipped past Lew to stand across from Fred.

"Thanks. You know there's kind of a knack to it," Fred said. "You get the heavy stuff on the bottom, see."

"Obviously," said Betsy, and Fred colored. Lew scratched at his mouth to hide a snicker. They finished sacking in silence, Betsy setting a loaf of bread on top of the last bag like a bride and groom on a wedding cake.

Fred watched her and then opened his mouth to speak, having apparently decided to carry on undaunted. "Some of us are going swimming tomorrow," he said. "You been to the pond?"

She shook her head. Lew hadn't been to the pond either; it was a place for kids, for young couples. Sometimes he and Dick talked about stealing up there sometime early—in the season, in the morning, whichever—only they hadn't yet. The creek was just as cold and twice as private, even if Dick couldn't swim laps in it.

"I can show you," he said. "Come pick you up, I mean." Abruptly he seemed to recall he was in the presence of Betsy's father, though he couldn't know just how barely Lew deserved the title. "I mean," he said again, "If that's okay."

Lew shrugged. He had the thought he should leave them to it; he busied himself with finding exact change in his pocketbook.

"I'd like that," he heard Betsy say.

"I get finished here at three," Fred said. "How's three-thirty?"

***

"You didn't tell me she met a boy," Lew said accusatorily to Dick that evening. "At church, of all places."

"That should reassure you," Dick said, flipping a steak. They were outside standing by the grill. Betsy was under the big shade tree reading her book and idly rubbing Buster's belly with her bare foot.

"What makes you think I need to be reassured?"

Dick ignored him. "I think it's a good thing," he said. "Meeting some local kids, seeing what they do around here for fun."

"What'd you do for fun?"

"I'm not from around here," Dick said.

Lew snorted. "Close enough."

This was a favorite gag of Lew's, one where every Pennsylvania town was as good as the next, Dick's boyhood a pastoral simulacrum instead of a real time particular to a real place. It had long ago lost whatever grain of humor it once might have possessed. But still Dick shrugged and indulged it, for some reason.

"I worked a lot," he said. "Played basketball. Sandlot baseball with some of the boys up the street when I could. Sometimes we'd go to the movies, if it was hot out and we were bored. We had a friend who worked in the projection booth. He used to sneak us in and give us free popcorn."

"You've got to be kidding me," Lew said. "Dick Winters, sneaking into the movies."

"It was the weekday matinee, Lew. Half the time it was just newsreels."

Lew shook his head in mock disappointment. "I hardly know you anymore."

Dick just laughed and prodded at the steak. "I think these are done," he said.

They piled them up onto a plate and took them into the kitchen, plated them with corn and scalloped potatoes. They ate on the porch, Betsy and Dick on either end of the swing and Lew on the steps. Lew brought out a pitcher of powdered lemonade and they set it on the windowsill away from the dog's prying snout. Once again the moment felt imbued with a strange weight; Lew imagined he could feel Betsy trying to work them out. She'd asked Dick about him on the way to church; she'd asked him about Dick in the car today. And that kid at the grocery store—Lew didn't love how quickly he'd been recognized, how easily associated with Dick.

In his head he heard Blanche on the phone: Well, whose fault is that? It was true he told Dick sometimes he didn't think anyone paid attention, but that was to the little things. Small idle touches, the glide of hand over hand, the kinds of things people see on the street and blink at before assuming they were mistaken, that it was nothing. But there was no mistaking the fact that he and Dick lived together all the way out here, without even the decency to take neighboring apartments in a suitably bustling town. Betsy might leave thinking it was a little strange that her confirmed bachelor father was shacking up with his old war buddy, but he'd leave it up to Kathy to cast aspersions on his peculiarities, or to Blanche to find her own delicate way to comment on the matter. He felt a little bad some days for all he heaped on his sister, for all he made her do the heavy lifting when it came to everyone they used to know. _Lewis can't make it. He sends his apologies. He's become a homosexual, you see, and moved to the country._

No, Betsy wasn't the problem. They'd make it through a fortnight easily enough. It was Fred Olmstead at the Quality Market, waving to Lew when he came in once a week for groceries, picking him and Dick out on the street and beginning to wonder about them. If there'd been the faintest possibility of retreating under the radar again once things returned to normal, Betsy's mixing with the locals would crush it like a cigarette beneath a boot-heel.

"You going tomorrow?" Lew asked Betsy, if only to get out of his own head.

She'd finished her steak, cut the meat into neat squares and dragged them through the bechamel that covered the potatoes. The corn she'd had more trouble with, evidently reluctant to pick it up and gnaw at it the way Dick and Lew had. At last she'd balanced it lengthwise and whittled off long golden ribbons with her knife. “You're wasting half the cob that way,” Dick said to her, so she took it up reluctantly again and nibbled politely at one end. Lew’s own plate was empty but for a few chunks of fat. He tossed one out onto the grass for Buster, who fell upon it with hedonistic zeal.

"He'll get sick," Dick said.

"Aw, just one'll be fine. Huh, Buster?"

"Your funeral, Nix."

Lew ignored him. He nodded at Betsy again. "So?"

"I guess so," she said, arms wrapped tightly around her knees.

"You—you have any kind of a curfew at home?"

Maybe it was early for disciplinary logistics, but Lew couldn't actually think of anything else to say. Betsy shrugged and inspected an invisible spot on her dungarees. "Dunno. Mother always says just don't wake the twins up."

"Well, I'm on the couch, and I'm a light sleeper," Lew said. "So I guess just don't wake me up and we'll be all right." Beside him, Dick snorted. It was a lie, of course; Lew could famously sleep through almost anything.

"Okay," said Betsy.

"He seemed like a nice kid," Lew offered.

"They're a nice family," said Dick. Betsy looked between Dick and Lew, and Dick was suddenly very interested in his own plate.

"We're just going swimming," said Betsy. She got to her feet, her motion abrupt enough to dislodge her henpecked corncob. It rolled off her plate and down the gently warped camber of the porch to its edge. Buster looked up from the yard, where he'd been combing the grass for nonexistent bits of meat.

Betsy grabbed for Lew's plate. She ignored the fallen corncob altogether, having apparently deemed its acknowledgement too awful a prospect. She held out a hand for Dick's plate next, stacked the two of them on top of her own. Then she turned on her heel and went into the house. Lew sat in silence, staring at Betsy's corn. Presently he got up himself, picked it up between thumb and forefinger and carried it down to the fenceline where trimmed lawn met pasture, Buster cantering hopefully at his heels.

As he reached the split-rail he lobbed the corncob overhand into the weeds, where it landed with a dry rustle. Then he sighed, leaned hard on the fence and looked out over the field. He could feel Dick's eyes on him. He half-expected him to come and stand beside him, but he didn't, and when Lew turned back to face the house Dick had already gone inside.

***

The following afternoon Betsy waited for Fred Olmstead out on the porch, which was quickly becoming her refuge. She'd been reticent all day, Lew having clearly crossed some invisible line the evening prior and Dick guilty by association. At three-thirty sharp a cloud of dust came up the drive, a white Ford pickup materializing out of it. He didn't honk for her, thank God; Lew would've found that unbearably uncouth and probably had to put a stop to proceedings immediately just on principle. Watching her trip out through the yard to climb into the passenger door Fred held open was dissonant enough. 

He was hovering at the window. Betsy saw him there and waved good-bye, and Lew felt embarrassed. He ducked out of sight again and stayed there until he heard the truck start up, turn a slow circle in the yard and retreat back up the drive. Then he went into the kitchen and opened up all the cabinets in turn, peered in and shut them again. He kept a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the Frigidaire for cooking, and he took it out and poured himself an inch or so in a coffee mug. The wine tasted bad, and was offensively unsatisfying. When he finished it he rinsed the mug out in the sink and went into the living room, having succeeded only in making himself feel sick. He guessed it was a little like playing chicken, like running your hand over a flame. Once he'd have sold his soul for a shitty bottle of white, though he'd have lied through his teeth about it til the second the bargain was struck. A drunk would drink any old thing, but Lewis Nixon was discerning. Lewis Nixon didn't drink the local, until of course he did. 

Dick came home at five to find him on the sofa, his perpetual haunt these days. In the mornings he folded his quilt and pillow and set them on a shelf in the hall closet, feeling like a displaced person. It was disconcerting, not having a room of one's own. You'd have thought he'd be used to it after the Army, but there was really only one thing Lew had gotten used to in the Army, and he was in the front hallway now, setting his briefcase down and hanging his hat on the rack.

“Hey,” Dick said. “Is she gone?” 

“Sure is,” Lew said. “Tore out of here at three-thirty on the dot.” 

“He was on time then?” Dick came into the living room. Lew lay his head back on the cushions and looked for him. Dick leaned on the back of the sofa and put his hand on Lew’s shoulder.

“You better believe it. Don’t keep a Nixon waiting.” 

Dick snorted. “I ever keep you waiting?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably.” 

Dick leaned over and kissed him, slid his fingers along Lew’s neck into his collar. Lew was emboldened by his illicit wine; he felt a little bad about it, but what Dick didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and anyway, he was distracted. 

“I owe you from the other day,” Dick said up against Lew’s mouth. 

“Mm.” Lew didn’t keep score, of course, but there was something about Dick walking in the door with a proposition that got his blood pumping. He’d take what he was owed, if Dick was offering. 

“Not here, though,” he said. 

Any other time he’d have been perfectly happy to have Dick on the sofa, to have him any old place, but today the sitting room felt too open and expansive, the windows themselves like eyes that stared inside, unblinking. 

“Not there either,” Dick said, nodding up at the ceiling, at the master bedroom that overlaid them. 

“Hope your bed can take it, then,” Nix said. 

Dick groaned. “I’m beginning to think you’re better off down here,” he said. “I should’ve known you were up to something, volunteering for the couch.” 

Lew hadn’t been up in the second bedroom since he’d cleaned it out. There was something collegiate about the way Dick had settled in. He’d cleared a path to the closet to hang his clothes up, but his bedside table was a shipping crate that currently housed a detective novel, a glass of water and a squat lamp. What didn’t fit in the closet was laid out across the rest of the room in as organized a fashion as Dick could manage. 

“Cozy,” Lew said. 

“Oh, shut up.” 

Dick sat back on the bed and kicked off his shoes and socks, splayed his legs wide and ran his bare feet over the floor. He gave a pleased sigh. When he looked up at Lew his eyes were heavy-lidded; probably a function of a long day, but the effect was seductive anyway, and Lew stepped up next to the bed into the space between Dick’s thighs. Dick fit his hands to Lew’s waist, let them slide down to his hips. He hooked his fingers into Lew’s belt loops and tugged like he was in midair, grappling with his risers. 

Lew swiveled his hips in an easy circle. “Got something on your mind?”

Dick laughed and thumbed at his fly. 

He should’ve figured Dick for a fair play kind of guy. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he undid the buttons on Lew’s trousers one by one, or when he leaned in and pulled Lew’s briefs down and kissed the place the elastic had creased his skin. But it was a surprise, just as it was every time Dick did this, going all the way back to the beginning. 

He remembered the first few times, the uneasy dance, Lew half-certain he’d blunder all over the place, Dick needing to be led. For all Lew could work up a bluster in the bedroom he’d been half a step ahead of Dick at best, proof positive that just because you’d thought about a thing once or twice or a dozen times over the years didn’t mean you wouldn’t fumble in the clutch. But Dick had been too green or too much of a gentleman to notice or to let on, and for that Lew was eternally grateful. 

Back then Dick could undo him with a noise, a blush. That was still true, except for the fact that Dick Winters was a damn fast learner and as such any noises or blushes he subjected Lew to nowadays were well-planned and all the more potent and unfair for being so. 

Dick skinned Lew’s briefs down most of the rest of the way and nosed along his hipbone. “Lemme get out of these,” Lew said, hobbled and shimmying in protest. Dick ignored him. Well, that was fine. He’d steady himself with a hand on the back of Dick’s head, let Dick do what he pleased with his mouth and his tongue and Lew’s cock, and if proceedings ended--as they sometimes did--in his thrusting into Dick’s mouth in messy staccato time then Dick had nobody to blame but himself. 

It was bold talk, though, and Lew knew it. Dick was good at sex, because he was Dick and he was good at everything because he damn well worked at it, which would be obnoxious if it wasn’t so alluring.

“Oh,” Lew said. “Goddammit, Dick.” He pitched forward at the waist and let his guiding hand fall to Dick’s shoulder, its purpose abandoned in the name of simply hanging on. 

All at once, Dick sat back. He looked pleased with himself, which only made Lew curse again, and louder. Again, Dick ignored him. He stripped his shirt off and flung it over the side of the bed. 

“Come here,” Dick said. 

He rolled backwards against the pillows, long body unfurling; he undid his trousers and lifted his hips up, shucking his pants off as expeditiously as he had by the creek the other day. His legs flexed, hamstrings bulging, calves balling. That was what got Lew, in the end, that same cleancut athleticism that made Dick’s erection slightly shocking, and made the fervency with which he kissed Lew doubly so. Lew pounced then, caught him up under the knee and drove Dick’s long leg up and back, toward his face. All that skin exposed and Lew could get his own back now, could lick his lips and look Dick dead in the eye, flash a grin that told him just what was coming, his teeth all along Dick’s tenderest parts. Dick laughed wildly, tortured and delighted. He thrashed like a fish fit to send them both off the bed. 

“Nix,” he cried. His voice was shrill as a choir boy’s, his body rictal. “Lew, quit, c’mon, _please_ \--”

Dick had his thighs clamped around Lew’s ears and Lew had them both messy with spit by the time he was ready to call it and move on to greater quarry. He broke up through Dick’s legs wet-faced, like some slick and hungry creature inbound from the surf. Their bodies tilted together. Dick took Lew’s backside in both hands and dug his fingernails in treacherously, and it was all of it so uncareful, so flagrant it gave Lew pause. 

For in the beginning he had been very concerned with making love to Dick, and what a relief he found it now not to have to. Or rather--to realize that he made love to Dick not in an aching and orchestral way but when he caught Dick’s elbow in the gut by mistake and wheezed a laugh anyhow, or when he slid home too fast and Dick yelped and Lew said Shh, sorry, sorry and Dick ran a hand up Lew’s arm to say it was all right, and when he lost his head, when Dick’s face was pink and he had sweat on his upper lip and he drove Lew crazy, just crazy, so much so that he pulled Dick into his lap and blurted oh, I love you, and meant every saccharine word. 

But most of all afterwards when they lay together in a sated heap, Dick’s fingers in Lew’s hair the way he’d always liked. Lew was drowsing. The room was stuffy and beneath him Dick was sweating. Lew’s cheek was wet again. He stuck his tongue out and lapped at Dick’s nipple like a cat, which he hated and which made him squirm and Lew laugh. 

“Don’t press your luck,” Dick said, trying to get him at arms’ length. “I’ll boot you out and make you go and put dinner on.” 

“I’m very mistreated, you know,” Lew said.

“Oh, are you?” 

“I am. I’m used.” 

“Oh?” 

“Uh huh. For my sexual prowess, of course, but we both know my true value lies in how well I keep you fed.” At this he prodded Dick’s abdomen. 

Dick sighed contentedly. “You’re right,” he said. “Without you I’d be doomed to a life of canned goods. Toast on a banner day.” 

“You burn it half the time,” Lew said. 

“Yeah. I do.” 

Dick shifted restlessly. Lew picked his head up and let Dick roll sideways on the bed to face him and sink his fingers back in at the damp nape of Lew’s neck. He pulled Lew in and kissed him lazily, and Lew remembered the first time they’d done this, really kissed, kissed until they had to either sleep or move on. He’d been drunk most of the time back then; he remembered Germany as one long hangover, and when he was sober he thought alternately of Kathy and of Dick, about their squalid foxhole in Bastogne and thought he’d die of mortification. 

His hand on Dick’s hoary lapel, his other hand--well. He wasn’t proud, but it had been a long enough war already.

He never did tease out what Dick had done with a girl. He’d long suspected not very much, and had come to terms with the deep and private sense of satisfaction engendered by that knowledge. 

“You’re jealous,” Dick had told him the night Blanche caught Lew watching him, the night Lew ended by getting stupendously drunk, snapping at Dick’s date and refusing to be helped into a taxi, refusing so vociferously he’d clocked Dick in the nose by mistake and loosed more blood than Dick had shed the whole war. He remembered watching it stream sickly over Dick’s face, over his chin and between his teeth, and thinking _I did that, all by myself._

He remembered the girl fretting like a moth around a streetlight, Blanche finally taking hold of her elbow to still her. “You’re driving me nuts,” she’d said. “Come on, you’re spending the night at my place. Dick, take him home.” 

Dick was staring up at the night sky, pinching his nose. He began to protest. “But--” 

Through the clotting blood the word sounded flabby-- _Bud_ \--and Lew had laughed. He’d been a bawdy drunk once but by the end he was thin and mean, the contents of his veins fizzing like acid back to his heart to scour it clean, and that night he felt as if he was almost there if you didn’t count Dick, which which Lew himself did twice and three times over. 

Blanche’s expression had brooked no argument, and Dick was forced to concede. Lew didn’t hear what he said to his date, though he saw her duck away from his apologetic lean and thought--again, meanly--that even Dick couldn’t bootstrap his way out of this.

They were silent on the way home, Lew’s head heavy against the window on the passenger side. He could feel Dick fuming beside him as he drove. He had never been good at not broadcasting his ire. Out of sorts he inspired a wide berth, like a lion with a thorn in its paw, though most of the time Lew was the dumb and dauntless cowbird who flitted too close anyway.  
After years of pitying every poor sucker who had the misfortune of crossing Dick Winters, it was intensely disquieting to sit here and know that tonight he had the honors. Dick could brood about something for a good long while; he did best when you left him to it. He’d pace or he’d run or he’d set his brain to unpicking some knot or other. Riding beside him now Lew wondered from beneath his smothering mantle of drink just how it would feel to be unpicked. 

They pulled into the drive and Dick parked the car so hastily they both pitched forward. He sat still as a stone, hands on the steering wheel, and in the dark of the car Lew saw him blink as though trying to clear his eyes of smoke or gas, some miasmic patch of atmosphere he’d been looking through too long. He thought Dick was going to let him have it then and there. He drew himself up and took a big breath like he was going to, but then he blew it out wordless instead and flung himself from the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind him with a crack Lew guessed had probably been extremely satisfying. 

So it was left to Lew to follow along once again, now far less drunk than he cared to be. He should’ve had one or two more, he thought, ended up horizontal in the men’s at the dancehall. Even mad as hell he thought Dick would’ve given him a pass then, if only because it wasn’t nearly so gratifying to ream out an unconscious man. 

He came into the house with a creeping feeling all about him, and as he stole into the shadow-crossed living room he realized he was afraid. Lew Nixon didn’t scare easily; even in the thick of it, in the shit up to his eyeballs, Lew could swallow fear down and belch up a joke in its place. He’d as good as bought the farm in Holland and said to Dick _Aw hell, I liked this helmet_ , and then he’d gotten drunk to beat the band. But now fear washed over him, rank and oily. 

The back of his throat felt raw; his stomach lurched and thought he’d go through to the bathroom and puke til he could see his dinner in the toilet bowl and then he’d go to sleep or start all over again, depending. His head was beginning to hurt. He could feel his heartbeat in his eyeballs. 

Dick put the lamp on. 

Lew winced and ducked to one side, and the fear gave way to a shameless urge to burrow. The room was too light and tonight he was too base for it, too much of an animal. Dick perched on the edge of the leather ottoman. He had lost his hat, thrown his jacket back over the couch and loosened his tie. The collar of his shirt was flecked with deep red, flaking blood dark on his face. He was perfectly silent, and having flicked the light on had gone perfectly still again. All at once Lew had the urge to fall on the damn sword and be done, to make his filthy bed and lie in it right here on the Oriental rug. He couldn’t quite say why, but he guessed he’d always appreciated the terminal romance of a lost cause. 

“Well,” Lew drawled. “I guess we better get this over with.”

And yes, yes, this had been the right choice. He could feel the temperature in the room spike before he’d even shut his mouth. He had a tilt-a-whirl in his stomach now, and if everything was coming up anyway wasn’t that a better choice of emetic?

He dredged up a swagger and paced the breadth of the rug. Dick blinked, the movement stunning, eyelids snapping like little guillotines. In the low light they looked awfully white, and Lew remembered that sometimes when Dick was sleeping he studied them, opalescent skin and the faint purplish vasculature beneath, and thought them perfect. 

Pay attention, he thought. Dick Winters and his perfect eyelids are trying to give you what for, and you’re trying not to let on that it’s killing you.

When Dick spoke he kept his eyes shut. “I can’t believe you,” he said. 

“Can’t you?” 

He shook his head. “No,” he said. 

“What’s not to believe? I’ve been right here this whole time, just like this.” 

“No,” Dick said again. 

He had his eyes open now, staring down at his hands. There was a smear of red along the back of his hand where he’d tried and failed to clean himself up, and Lew felt a brief rush of liquid affection at the sight.

“No,” Dick went on. “You--it hasn’t been like this. You haven’t always been like this, this--” 

He looked bewildered, as though talking to himself, talking through something the way he often did. Feels bad, being unpicked, Lew decided. Don’t like it. 

“This what?” 

“You embarrassed me tonight,” Dick said. 

He did look up then, right at Lew, and once again Lew felt that cunicular urge to crawl under the furniture. He let the feeling roll through him, and as he’d hoped it sparked and caught and all at once he was angry. He laughed. 

“Oh, I’ve always been embarrassing. You just haven’t been paying attention.” 

“I’m serious, Lew. You should’ve seen yourself. The way you talked to that poor girl--” 

Lew scoffed. “I’m sure she’s got a damn name, Dick.” 

Dick looked abashed. “Colleen.”

“I’m sure Colleen will forgive you my trespasses.” 

“That’s not the point, and you know it.” 

“Just show up Monday morning with a bunch of roses. Or better yet, tomorrow. Hell, go now. Blanche’ll let you in, you can crawl right in with her and plant one on that pretty pink--” 

“Stop it,” Dick said. 

“You stop it. I’m just giving you a little friendly advice. Not bad for a drunk on a bender, I’d say. Pretty damned coherent.” 

He swallowed. _Drunk_ \--the word tasted strange, and he realized that he’d never really said it aloud before. Privately, maybe, his personal demons in mocking chorus more often than he cared to admit, but not aloud, not in front of Dick. 

Dick flinched as though he’d been struck. “You’re not--” he started, but he let the words trail, looked down again and gave a little shake of his head. 

“Can’t lie,” Lew said. “But you can’t say it either, can you. Even after everything that’s happened you still can’t say it.” 

And maybe that was the hell of it. Maybe they’d go down together that way, Dick bearing him up to the last, and Lew raising a glass to him every time. Because it felt good, just like back in the foxhole. That night Dick had clawed for comfort and for warmth just as readily as Lew had, and maybe he had to be a little unsavory to get at it, but that was Dick. Wiping the muck from things, holding them to the light to consider with an eye Lew had always taken for clearer and less jaundiced than his own.

Standing in the living room long past midnight, he realized that since he’d known Dick what he’d been hoping for was to wake up one day and really believe that Dick had gotten him right: had somehow, exclusively, seen the truth of him. That Lew had been wrong about himself all along, like the urchin in stories spirited away, into a land of which he’s destined to be king. 

***

They lay in the bed a long time, as though making up for Lew’s nights on the couch. They didn’t sleep, not really; they were both half expecting Betsy home any second, expecting to have to run for it, and anyway Dick wouldn’t make it very long before he wanted dinner. They talked quietly awhile and then they fell silent, and presently the silence weighed too heavy on Lew and he opened his mouth to address the ceiling. As he did he set the arch of his foot over Dick’s bony ankle in a sort of preemptive apology.

“I had a drink tonight,” he said. 

Next to him Dick swallowed. “Did you? When?” 

“Oh, a little before you got home.”

“Huh,” Dick said. Lew felt the pillow shift, felt Dick look at him. He didn’t look back. “Well,” Dick said, voice full of a shrug. “How’d it feel?” 

Lew stretched and groaned. The light in the cramped little room was beginning to wane. They’d have to get up soon. He slid his leg along Dick’s shin and grimaced as the hair caught. “I didn’t feel anything at all,” he said. He laughed joylessly. “I don’t know, I just figured I ought to confess.” 

Dick didn’t reply. He took a breath, but no words materialized. Lew hadn’t felt better drinking the wine and he didn’t feel better talking about it. 

“Just the one?” Dick said finally.

“Yeah. Cooking wine, if you can believe it. Not exactly inspiring.” 

“Hmm.” 

Lew always got the picture Dick didn’t know what to say when he talked about his drinking, not to mention how to say it. He’d never known, and Lew had never been certain whether or not he was genuinely stymied by the topic or just uncomfortable. He supposed it must be the latter, because he’d never seen Dick stuck for long on a problem he wanted to solve.

Dick sat up then, kicked the sheets back and leaned down for his undershirt. Lew watched as he found his shorts shoved down the leg of his discarded trousers, extricated them and put them back on. 

“You want a shower?” Lew asked, meaning together. 

Dick shook his head. “I’ll be in and out.” 

“She won’t be back yet.” 

“Even so.” 

Lew was decidedly put out by the sad lack of opportunity for harassing Dick while naked and slippery--he had apparently been wary enough of Betsy’s return to dress in the bathroom--and after he’d taken his turn in the shower he stomped downstairs to contemplate the state of the kitchen. He peered into the refrigerator and wondered what had possessed him to buy so much eggplant, of all things. 

“You like eggplant?” he asked Dick, who’d come traipsing in behind him in his stocking feet. Dick in socks had always struck Lew as particularly poignant for some reason, and he smiled into the vegetable drawer as Dick stepped close and slung an arm around his waist. 

“I don’t know,” Dick said. “Do I like eggplant?” 

“I saw a recipe for eggplant,” Lew said. He had; he found it one of his cookbooks, the one that had come secondhand by way of Dick’s mother, who couldn’t have known the book’s destination. 

“Here we go,” Lew said, running his fingernail down the list of ingredients for Eggplant Creole. 

“Is it going to be spicy?” 

“You’ll like it,” Lew said. “I think.” He set the book on the countertop and set to assembling butter, onion, breadcrumbs, canned tomatoes. “Hand me a baking dish, will you?” he asked Dick. 

Dick rummaged in the drawer set in under the oven, dragging a dish out amidst a clatter of pans. “This it?” 

“That’ll work. How is your mother, anyway?” 

Having handed off the dish Dick turned and leaned against the sink and watched Lew, arms crossed over his chest in a manner that reminded Lew a little of Betsy. Dick looked looser, though; he carried his body now with the same kind of satisfied fatigue that Lew imagined followed sports. 

“Oh, same old,” Dick said. “Going wild over Ann and Tom, of course. Baby’s due in October, can you believe it?”

“I cannot,” Lew said. He’d forgotten there was a baby in the offing at all until precisely that moment, and from the look on Dick’s face he’d been rather obvious about it.

“I guess I’ll go and visit. You know, you should come,” Dick said. 

Lew was chopping the eggplant. He paused in mid-dice. “I’m not much for babies.” 

“She’d love to see you,” Dick said. “She likes you, you know.” 

“I met her once,” Lew said. 

“So? She likes you. She asks about you in her letters.” 

“She ask you about other things? Can’t imagine she doesn’t want some cousins for that kid of hers, a sister-in-law to buddy up with.” 

He didn’t know why he was asking about this now. Something had loosed the questions in him. He palmed the eggplant, skin dark and shiny as an oil spill, and tossed it into a pan. He added a knob of butter and lit the stove. 

Dick slid across the aisle between the countertop and the island to stand next to him. He took up an onion and a paring knife--wrong tool for the job, even Dick would appreciate that, but Lew wouldn’t say anything. He sliced the onion in half, its flesh pale and papery, stuck to the blade. Immediately Lew’s eyes swam and stung, and he cursed and turned his face away. 

“Sorry,” Dick said. “You okay?” 

“Fine,” Lew said. “You didn’t answer my question.” 

Dick sighed. “She used to ask,” he said. “I talked to her about it.” 

“What did you say?” 

“I told her...that I thought some things weren’t going to happen for me.” 

“Jesus. What’d she say to that?” 

“Not much. She said she understood.” 

Dick sighed again, like he was filling his whole body up, like all that oxygen swirling around made a lie by omission a little easier to bear. “She thinks it must be the war. She didn’t say it like that, but I’m sure that’s what she thinks.”

He set to on a quarter of the onion. Lew looked away. He never did like to watch someone cut with a sharp knife; he always cringed preemptively, anticipating a slip. Now he wanted to hide his hands in his pockets to spare his fingers. 

“Well, it is, isn’t it?” he asked, watching the sauté pan. “The war.” The liquid butter had begun to spit; Lew lowered the flame. 

“Not like that, Lew.” 

“Sure.” 

He pawed at the cubes of eggplant with his spatula. Dick reached out and grabbed him around the forearm. The butter hissed in the pan. Dick set his forehead against Lew’s temple. 

“Not like that,” Dick said again. 

“You’ll burn yourself,” Lew said, twisting his arm away. 

They ate dinner. Dick liked it, or pretended to. When Betsy came home at a quarter to ten Lew was still awake, sitting up against the back of the sofa reading a book. She made as if to dart upstairs, and he would have let her go. But she paused, one hand on the banister, and then she came into the living room and sat on the edge of Dick’s armchair. 

Her hair was wet, brushed back from her face. Her cheeks were pink with sunburn. She looked sleepy, drunk on fresh air and the outdoors. If she was drunk on anything else she hid it well, and he didn’t press. 

“Hi,” she said. She sounded a little nervy, as though she thought she might be in trouble. 

He set his book down. God, he felt old all of a sudden. Wasn’t it just yesterday he’d been coming in from all manner of indiscretions? He used to pound through the house sometimes on the off chance he’d be noticed. Half the time his parents hadn’t even been home. 

“Hi,” he said. “Good day?”

She nodded, half shrugged. “Sure,” she said.

“How was the pond?” 

She smiled down at her lap. A private smile, not for him. “Nice,” she said. “I never swam in a pond before.” 

“Really? No kidding.” 

“Just the sea. In France. And we go to the pool at the Waldorf sometimes.” 

He shook his head. “You’re a real Nixon, kid,” he said. 

She looked pleased with that, which was so far beyond his comprehension he had to beg off and send her upstairs, claiming exhaustion.

***

The next morning he took her out to feed the horses. “Dick usually does this,” Lew said, as they cut a path through the grass down to the barn, blueish and cool in the shade. “But he had to cut out early. He had a meeting.” 

He laughed softly to himself at the thought. Even now the premise amused him, Dick with his coat and hat, his morning commute. 

“What is it he does, anyway?” asked Betsy. “If you’re an investor you ought to know.” There was a slant to her words that made him slow up and look at her, but she was walking on easily, eyes on the treeline. 

“Cow feed,” Nix said. “He makes supplements for cow feed.” 

“Oh,” Betsy said. She pressed her lips together. “Is it a family business?” she asked. 

He laughed. He could hear Kathy in the question, echoes of assigned seats at dinner parties, some crusty grande dame at her elbow and Lew off in a clubby foyer sucking on a cigar and a bourbon. What a shit show, Lew would say in the car afterwards, and Kathy would sniff and fumble for a cigarette and say, I had a nice time. 

“No,” Lew said. “He started it himself.” 

“After the plant closed?” 

“Yeah. He took some business classes. I think he always figured on starting something.” 

“Did you always figure on helping out?” 

He swallowed. “Oh, I don’t know. It seemed the thing to do at the time. He helped us out, you know, coming to work for us after the war. He could’ve--” He could’ve done anything, Lew wanted to say. He swallowed again, and harder. “He could’ve just moved back home.” 

“Didn’t his parents want him to?” 

“Probably.” 

That was a kid’s question. Lew wasn’t sure he could remember the last time he’d thought seriously about what his parents might want. Maybe in that recruitment office up in Trenton. Maybe the first time he jumped out of a plane. 

“Mother always said grandpa gave him the job,” she said. “That he did you a favor.” She was looking at him sideways. There was a particular cast to those words too, he thought, the sum more damning than its parts. 

“Your grandpa thought he was doing everyone a favor just by breathing the same damn air they did.” He came off sharper than he meant to. 

She wiped her hands on her dungarees and looked pointedly past him, and she didn’t say anything else until they got to the barn. 

He went ahead of her and pushed the door open. The barn was always dim; on entering it gave the impression of closeness, but as they moved further inside and their eyes adjusted to the lower light and they emerged into a vast space full of warmth and golden light, the sun streaming in through the chinks in the clapboard in shards like topaz. The air was sweet-smelling, hay and the yeasty tang of feed, the sourness of sweat and horse shit. She breathed in deep and smiled to herself and he knew then she was a horsey sort of girl. He was gratified. Lew’s grandfather used to say you knew a man was decent if he got along with horses and dogs, and Lew had used that as a yardstick ever since he was a kid. 

“You ride?” 

She nodded. 

“Your aunt Blanche used to ride like crazy,” Lew said. 

“I know,” said Betsy. “She takes me sometimes. She’s really good.” 

“She rode at Madison Square Garden once. Showjumping. I thought Mom would have a heart attack. She had this horse, Polly--black as your hair. Kind of a compact little thing, but she could jump like nobody’s business. They were bound to win the whole deal but she clipped a rail on the last fence.” 

He could remember the hot lights, the soft beat of hooves on half a ton of cedar carted in for footing on the floor of the arena. He remembered the sheer size of the place, and how it had seemed whimsical, horses leaping around inside. He should have been beyond wonder then, nearly twenty, already drinking, but he’d felt wonder that night. The murmur of the crowd, gathered to a crescendo. The communal intake of breath, then _Oh!_ as the last rail floated free as if by some ill magic. 

“Isn’t that just like Blanche,” his father said, and got up to leave. 

The horses put their heads over the stall doors, expectant as children. Tulip the dun, her nose and forelock inky, and Caliban, a fat little chestnut a hair too big to be a pony. They were friends, but only just. Lew thought it was more like they’d tolerated one another so long it had swung around to amity. Betsy went up to Tulip and stroked her neck, making an approving noise. 

“They’re so pretty,” she said. “Are they Dick’s?” 

“Sort of. They came with the farm. The old lady who owned the place before--before Dick bought it moved into a home and couldn’t bring them. The realtor offered to take them off his hands, made some noise about a meat auction.” 

Betsy wrinkled her nose. “How horrible,” she said. 

“Yeah, that’s about the face Dick made. Needless to say--” He gestured at Caliban-- “They stayed put.” 

“And now you’re hungry,” she said in a singsong. “Aren’t you?”

She went to the feed bin and opened it, dipped the bucket. The horses snorted and clamored. The cat came down from the hayloft to see what all the fuss was about, sprang blithely into a stall and wove about Tulip’s legs. 

When the horses had their faces in their buckets she went to a stall door and leaned on it, peering in at Caliban’s broad back. He stood alongside her, and he wondered, oddly, if they looked the same from behind, if they had a stance that matched, a lean, a common way of being in the world. If a stranger, coming upon them like this, would know he was her father. He’d have asked Dick about it, but he thought it sounded stupid. He remembered taking her to the playground in Nixon all those years ago, half convinced some well-meaning housewife would see them and call the police, thinking her kidnapped. 

“Betsy,” he asked. “Why did you really come here?” 

She was quiet at first but the face she made was unsurprised, as though she’d anticipated the question and had a response prepared. “Mother always said you ran away to the war,” she said. “And after awhile I started thinking that didn’t make sense, because everyone else’s father was in the war, and they all came back.” 

She leaned deeper into the stall, so her face was out of line with his. “So then I thought, if it wasn’t the war, what was it?”

There was no answer he could give her, and she might have one of her own already. He sighed. “Look--” 

“Can we ride them?” she asked. 

He was still stuck on her first question. “Let their stomachs settle first,” he said eventually. “Anyway, it’ll take us that long to get the tack together.” 

They went into the tiny, dusty tack room, the cat prowling after them lazily. The bridles hung from hooks, limp and batlike, and there were a host of saddles in varying sizes nobody had touched since they’d bought the place. Betsy went over to the wall and took a bridle down, fingering the reins, flexing the leather back and forth. 

“These are filthy,” she said. “They need a good going over. Have you got any soap?” 

Lew shrugged. “Somewhere. You can’t just use them like that?” 

“You can,” she said. “I guess.” She picked through the selection with great deliberation, although they all looked the same to Lew, who had always been tangentially horsey but never a great connoisseur of the details. Finally she chose one, took it down and slipped her arm between the crown and browband. 

“What about you?” She asked. 

“Oh, I’m fine. I’ll watch from the sidelines.” 

She stuck out her bottom lip and he very nearly caved, nearly gave in to a bizarre paroxysm of indulgence he usually reserved for the dog when he whined at the foot of their bed on a cold night, or for Dick when he was ill. 

When the horses were finished eating they walked them out of the stalls, Betsy haltering Tulip, who gave her a long sideways glance that seemed to say she’d better be made of stern stuff. Betsy laughed and combed through the mare’s mane with her fingers. She took the bridle with only minor protestation, and Lew was reduced to looking on, slightly cowed, as Betsy had precisely none of Tulip’s nonsense. 

“Oh, come on,” she said, as the horse tossed her head. She hooked an arm around her long nose and held her steady, gentle but firm, and stuck a thumb in the corner of her mouth to trick it open for the bit. Tulip mouthed at it, showing her great pink tongue. 

“She looks like the dog,” said Lew, and Betsy laughed and led Tulip alongside the gate, got a leg up on one of the weather-worn white slats and sprang deftly aboard, bareback. 

“There you go, miss,” she said to the horse. “That wasn’t so bad, was it.” 

He stood by the gate and watched the two of them amble down the length of the field. Near the bottom where pasture met woods the grass was long; it might come up to Tulip’s knees, graze the bottom of Betsy’s feet. As he watched Buster came bounding up from the trees, and Tulip snorted and hopped indignantly to one side. 

A spike of long-dormant fear went through him, and he remembered suddenly when she was very young, weeks old maybe, and once in the night he had woken to her screaming and had thought at first he was having a nightmare. Beside him Kathy slept, and though in reality he was certain it would be only seconds before she too opened her eyes it seemed in the moment an eternity from which he would never emerge, in which he was alone, gripped with a primal sort of fear he had never expected to feel. 

Kathy’d woken then, viscious with exhaustion. “What are you doing?” she said, and she’d thrown the bedclothes back and dashed to Betsy’s room as Lew followed extraneously. 

In the end it was a hair that had done it, one of Kathy’s, long and wavy and translucently blonde. It was wrapped around the baby’s little toe, round and round, purpling it like a wine grape, and Kathy had cried and carried on-- _oh God, Lewis, if you hadn’t woken_ \--and he thought it was nice of her to say, to credit him with waking, and so he’d gathered her up in his arms and put his hand in that treacherous hair he’d always liked so much, bright as a beacon. He watched Betsy settle back to sleep. He could feel Kathy breathing against his chest, felt her breath slow as if in time with the baby’s, and he’d felt that fear again, weaker now, a ghost. 

He watched Betsy straighten on Tulip’s back as she shied. He imagined her fingers tightening vainly in the slick mane, dessicated leather of the reins going dusty in her hands, but his thoughts came to nothing just as the hair had, and when the horse had gentled again she scolded Buster and continued down the field. 

***

By a week or so later several things had happened. Betsy had again gone along with Dick to church, and again Lew had stayed home. Betsy had gone swimming twice more with Fred Olmstead and his cadre of local hooligans (“They aren’t hooligans, Lew”) and had gone to the movies with him once. Blanche sent a postcard of the new bungalows at the Chateau Marmont, which Dick inspected as carefully as if it were a painting. 

“These look...sparse,” he said diplomatically.

“Blanche is a fiend for architecture,” Lew said, peering at her loopy hand. “Does it say when she’s getting back to New York?” 

The postcard was unforthcoming, and Lew was only slightly ashamed to admit that he’d rung her up shortly thereafter, just in case. But the line rang and rang, and when the operator came back on he said dejectedly that there was no message. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Betsy, he reasoned. And, all told, the sudden visit had worked out reasonably well. But he’d have lied to say he didn’t feel as if he was perpetually holding half a breath, that he wasn’t thinking of how it would feel to let it go when he saw her off for the last time. 

The last thing that happened was that Dick came home from work one evening looking bemused. “Well, guess what happened,” he said. hanging up his hat. “Audrey quit on me.” 

“No kidding,” said Lew. 

“Yeah. She’s getting married, moving to Boston to be with him right away.” 

Lew had been reading a letter from Kitty Welsh. He folded it and slid it back in its envelope. “She couldn’t give you two weeks?” 

Dick shrugged. 

“Wasn’t that in that damn contract you drew up?” 

“Yes,” Dick said. “I let her out of it.” 

“Well then what’s the point of having one?” Lew asked. “God, you’re a soft touch. I’ll bet you gave her a bonus to boot.” 

“She was due for a raise,” Dick said lamely. “And they’re getting married. It was the right thing to do.” He came and sat next to Lew on the sofa and snatched up the letter from its resting place on his lap. 

“Ah well,” Lew said. “Young love, huh?” 

“Something like that. I had a thought, though,” Dick said, running his fingers over the Welshes’ return address. “What if Betsy stayed on the rest of the summer, worked for me in Audrey’s place?” 

“Wait, really?” 

“Why not? I’m sure she’d be good at it. And it’d be good for her, wouldn’t it? To get some experience?” 

Lew was momentarily left speechless, his mind spinning like a hamster wheel around the concept of _stay for the rest of the summer._ He’d just opened his mouth to say something unequivocal, something like “Oh, well, I don’t know,” when Betsy came into the room holding a magazine.

Lew’s first thought was that they’d been very stupid, that it was lucky Dick was believably close to the other end of the sofa, that he hadn’t done something disastrous like kick his shoes off and lay his feet in Lew’s lap the way he sometimes did. He sat up straighter anyway, and moved a little further away. 

“Hi,” Betsy said on seeing Dick. Then, “What if I what?” 

“Oh, Dick said. “My secretary quit, and I--I was wondering if you’d like the job. Just for the summer, of course, and it’d mean you have to stay here. I’m not sure if you want--” 

“Sure,” Betsy said. 

“Wait,” Lew said again. “Really?” 

They ignored him. 

“It’d be like a real job,” Dick said. “All week, but I’d pay you the going rate. I don’t know, I thought you might like to make some money, learn to keep an office. Audrey might have a few days to teach you shorthand before she goes.” 

“She’s never going to be a secretary, Dick,” Lew said. 

They both looked at him then, Dick a little sharply, Betsy with a kind of obstinance he recognized. He’d lost, and he knew it, nevermind he didn’t quite know what he was playing for in the first place or why Dick’s idea peeved him so. 

“I might be,” Betsy said haughtily. She smiled at Dick. “You never know. Besides, all the kids here have jobs. Do you think I might get out early some afternoons?” 

“We can work out a schedule,” Dick said. “Why don’t you come into the office with me in the morning? I can show you around, we can talk about it.” 

She grinned. “All right,” she said. “I guess I’ll wire Mother tomorrow and let her know. She’ll think it’s the strangest thing.” She smiled wider, as though the thought delighted her. Lew felt furious. The phone rang, and he thought at once that the whole scene, this whole summer was like a stage play. He was ready to be done with it. 

“That’ll be Fred,” said Betsy. “I’ll get it.” She tucked her magazine under her arm and charged into the hallway to answer. 

Lew seized Dick by the arm and jerked his head in the direction of the front door. Dick rolled his eyes, but he followed Lew out of the living room, out the door and onto the porch. Lew strode to the far corner and fished a cigarette out of his pants pocket. He lit it and took a deep and acrid drag, and then he turned and blew smoke out over the perfect vista beyond the maple tree.

“What’s the matter?” Dick asked. “I’d have thought you’d like the idea.” 

“ _I’d_ have thought she’d made her point to Kathy by now,” Lew said. “So I don’t see why she’s got to stay here and hammer it home working for you.” 

“Maybe it isn’t Kathy she’s trying to make the point to,” Dick said softly. 

“Oh, what’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You know perfectly well,” Dick said. “She’s here, Lew, and whether you like it or not it’s got something to do with you.” 

Lew thought about what she’d said in the barn, and thought that she was wrong, first of all, that not everyone’s father had come back. And second of all anyone who knew him knew that running off to war was entirely in character. He’d just had the good fortune to shake out on the right side, to get to call himself a hero. 

“Your insight’s touching, but it’s a little late, don’t you think?” 

“Better than never,” Dick said. He sighed and leaned on the porch rail next to Lew, bumping their shoulders together. “What did Kitty have to say in her letter?” 

“The usual. They want us to visit. They wonder why we don’t. Harry’s going to come up here and strap me to the roof of his car like a Christmas tree.” 

Dick laughed quietly. “We should. You know, Wilkes-Barre isn’t so far from Ann and Tom. We could go in October, after the baby’s born. Call it a stopover on the way to Harry’s. That would--that would explain why you came along.” 

“Wouldn’t even be a lie,” Lew said. “And anyway, it’s always better to have an exit strategy with these things.” 

Dick gave him an arch look, which Lew privately thought was pretty rich. After all, hadn’t it been Dick all those years ago who’d come high-tailing it up to Nixon in that rattletrap of a car, so eager to get away from home, to get started on his new life? Dick drove to Lancaster December 23rd every year and came home bright and early on the 26th, claiming he missed the dog. Barring holidays, they hadn’t slept a night apart since--well. He wouldn’t think about it, not now when he was beginning to ease out of his snit. 

She’d stay another month or so. He’d pour out that bottle of wine. He’d lure Dick to the barn some night in the name of keeping quiet and they’d do it in the hayloft and it would make a good story to tell each other later. 

***

Blanche finally deigned to return to the East coast a week or so later. She called on a Sunday, late, and rather than apologize she said she was on California time, as though it was unfortunate the rest of the country hadn’t yet righted itself accordingly. 

“So,” she said. “Can I expect her on the first train tomorrow?” 

“Ha-ha. Change of plans,” he said. “Dick’s hired her on.” 

“What, in the _cattle business_?” 

Lew rolled his eyes at the receiver. “As his secretary. His old girl quit, and he got some grand plan into his head about giving Betsy a summer job and building her character.” 

“You see? I told you to put Dick on the case. How wonderful for both of them,” she said drily. “How’re you holding up?” 

“As well as can be expected. Oh, and she’s got herself a boyfriend on top of it.” 

“Well, that’s why she wanted to stay,” Blanche said, as though Lew was a small child. “For God’s sake, Lewis, don’t let her get into any trouble. Kathy will have us both shot.” 

“Me first, I’ll bet. And sure, I’ll get right on it. As if I have half a clue how to deal with keeping a couple of sixteen-year-olds out of each other’s pants.” 

“Cast your memory back,” she said. “Barring that, have him over for dinner and glower at him.” 

“I have got quite the glower,” he said. “It’s all in the eyebrows.” 

She laughed, and when she’d finished they were quiet a moment. In the darkened hallway he drew a hand down his face and was suddenly very glad for her. “You should come and visit,” he said. He could hear the look she gave him over the line. 

“You know, I think I’ll leave you to it. Besides, it sounds as if you’ve got a full house.” 

He got the feeling she somehow knew about his sleeping on the couch. 

“We do at that,” he said. “Oh well. Some other time.” 

“Why don’t you do one better and come up here,” she said. “Both of you. Tell Dick I’ll run out and buy a pint of milk just for him.” 

“He’ll be touched,” said Lew. He stifled a yawn. “I’m done for,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted, huh?” 

“Please,” she said. “Staying off the sauce?” she added as an afterthought, and he had the distinct but impossible impression she knew somehow about the wine. 

He ignored her. “Goodnight, Blanche.” 

“Goodnight, Lew.”

He remembered the first time he drank with her, at some family wedding, both of them old enough to wish they were somewhere else, and old enough to swan up to the bartender no questions asked. He remembered fetching Blanche glass after glass of champagne, and before long they were unapologetically smashed, wild, dancing together. 

“Let’s do a tango,” Blanche said. “Or a tarantella!” 

She stole a rose from one of the centerpieces and set it between her teeth, and when their mother saw she took Blanche by the elbow with a bruising strength and told her she ought to be ashamed. She caught his eye from over their mother’s shoulder, biting her cheek to keep from smiling. 

He was with Blanche the day Dick got the telegram. They were drunk then too. They’d met for lunch at the Amazon Room and Lew had had a couple of drinks, or four, and Blanche had tutted at him and stolen one, brazenly, the whole glass of whiskey. 

“I thought you liked wine at lunch,” Lew said, and she’d shrugged and tossed it back and giggled. Afterwards they felt drowsy, the afternoon settling around them with a gentle weight, like eiderdown. They’d trodden through it as through new powder snow, back to her apartment, and when she went into the kitchen to make coffee Lew fell asleep on the couch. 

When he stirred again it was evening. The light in the apartment was wet; out the windows the lights on the avenue below melted by beyond the rain on the glass. The kind of night to stay in, and maybe he would. He’d drive back to Nixon in the morning. Have something light for dinner, a good solid nightcap. He felt preemptively sated at the thought.

“I didn’t have the heart to wake you,” Blanche said, interrupting his reverie as she came into the living room. Her face was Tiffany blue in the cast from the window. She was frowning, thinking of something. 

“What is it?” he asked, trouble fanning out inside him like ink in water.

“Dick called,” she said. 

“What’d he say?” 

“Oh, nothing,” Blanche said. “Just wondered if you’d started back yet, and I said you were having a bit of a catnap, and he said all right. Only--” she bit her lip. 

“What?” 

“Only he sounded a little funny,” she said. 

“Funny how?” 

_Funny_ had a range Lew couldn’t begin to consider, not this time of day, and certainly not when it came to Dick. 

“I couldn’t say.” 

She sat on the edge of the couch and plucked at his sleeve. “But I think you’d better go, if you’re going. The weather’s awful. There’ll be traffic.” 

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.” 

She was; it seemed every car between upper Manhattan and Nixon was obliged to creep along at a snail’s pace. It was bad for Lew’s mood, not to mention his blood pressure. A headache throbbed at his temples, and he thought only of the curative whiskey for which he was growing overdue. The need grew so great, and he clutched the steering wheel so tightly to stave off the shakes that he nearly forgot about Dick, about what had inspired him in the first place to get behind the wheel at six o’clock on a rainy Friday along with every other licensed driver in the tri-state area. 

He went into the house and made straight for the wet bar in the sitting room, fingers not quite as deft as he’d have liked on the neck of the bottle. He filled his glass and took a fortifying gulp, and only then did he notice Dick, sitting on the edge of the ottoman with his elbows on his knees. He was looking at Lew, or rather looking past him, as if only marginally aware of the fact that he’d come into the room. 

Lew licked his lips. _He sounded a little funny_ , said Blanche in his head. 

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry I’m so late. Getting out of the city was a nightmare.” 

Dick nodded absently. He had something in his hand, a flimsy square of paper. He held it between his index and middle fingers, fanning the air with it, and as Lew watched he flicked his wrist and send it airborne like a paper plane minus the dynamism. The paper cruised to a stop at Lew’s feet. 

“What’s that?” Lew asked. 

“Take another drink,” said Dick. 

“What?” 

“Do it,” Dick said. “And hell, pour me one. You can drink it for me after you read the thing.” 

“What’s got you so riled up?” 

Dick waved his hand at Lew’s feet. 

“All right, all right.” 

Lew drank as directed. Then he knelt, the gesture more awkward than it should have been. He felt unwieldy these days; once alcohol had made him spritely, afizz with bright energy, but more and more now it pinned him like a fat beetle flipped supine, legs waving. 

He snatched up the paper and stood again. He read it, then he read it over, and then he balled it up and dropped it. He wanted the telegram out of his hand; he didn’t even want to hold it long enough to decide what corner of the room to pitch it to. There was no fire lit in the hearth, and that was a goddamn shame. He poured himself another. 

“I wasn’t kidding,” Dick said. 

“Goddammit,” Lew said, reaching for a second glass. “Of all the times to start drinking.” He poured Dick out a shot’s worth. 

Dick got up and came to stand beside Lew at the bar. Lew slid the glass over to him. He took it, but didn’t drink. 

Dick was both too close and not close enough. Things might be better if he took a step back, or several, or if Lew went back out the front door and retraced his earlier path all the way back to Blanche’s sofa. 

“They can’t do it,” Lew said. “You were discharged.” 

Dick shrugged. “And now I’m being recalled to active duty.” 

“Active duty? You weren’t _inactive._ You weren’t anything. You were done.” 

“I was done,” Dick said. 

“Look, are you sure you didn’t--” 

“What? Put in a request? Lew, I didn’t ask for this. Why would I? I don’t know the first thing about Korea.” 

“You wanted to go to the Pacific,” Lew said lamely. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe Ron called you up, got you frothing at the mouth for the good old days.” 

“There was nothing good about the war,” Dick said. 

And that smarted, even as Lew told himself Dick was only being figurative, and anyway the two of them weren’t _the war_ , even if Dick woke him up some nights scrabbling at the mattress, muttering, even if Dick’s phone calls home these days were one long change of subject, even if Lew felt his stomach turn at the smallest things: Lucky Strikes, peaches in syrup, a plane flying low. 

He must’ve made a face because Dick moved to put his arm on Lew’s arm, moved dumb and clumsy and fumbled with the glass of whiskey and sent it to the floor to shatter, and Lew thought _at least something in this house is reacting appropriately, for Christ’s sake._

“When?” he asked, as if the glass wasn’t in a million pieces at his feet, his ankles and dress shoes soaked. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. Dick flinched, at the busted glass or Lew’s tone or both. 

“Two weeks.” 

“Where?” 

“Fort Dix, to start. It’s close, at least. I’ll come home weekends when I can.” 

“Don’t lose your pass,” Lew said, without humor. 

Dick’s answering laugh was just as brittle. He shook his head and leaned down to pick up the biggest pieces of glass. “It’ll burn itself out,” he said from Lew’s feet. “Before it comes to anything.” 

“Funny. That’s what my dad said back in ‘41. December the sixth, I think it was.” 

“Oh, he did not say that.” 

“I swear to God, he did. The irony just about made up for his being wrong. Dick, leave the glass, it’s fine.” 

“No, you’ll cut yourself. I’ll go and get a dustpan,” Dick said. 

He went into the kitchen. Lew could hear him banging about looking for the pan. _It’s in the pantry,_ he wanted to call, but he didn’t. The glass crunched beneath his feet. He poured himself another whiskey and slugged it. He’d had another by the time Dick came back in, and moved the glass away so Dick wouldn’t think anything of it. Moved it a hair closer, moved it back again.

Dick must have realized Lew was drunker now than three whiskeys could account for, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t scold or wag a finger when Lew poured himself another still and took it over to the couch, where he watched Dick sweep up the remnants of the glass and mop the wood with a cloth. 

“I hate seeing you on your knees like that,” Lew said. “You never did let me get a maid.” 

Dick looked up, frowning at the non sequitur. “What?” 

“Nothing.” 

Dick dumped his washcloth in the dustpan. He came over to Lew and got on his knees again, kneeling between the couch and the coffee table. Lew had his whiskey at a lax angle. Dick took it from him neatly and set it just out of reach, and then he folded Lew’s hands between both of his and held them, head bowed as if praying. Maybe he was, which was a disturbing thought. 

God doesn’t care about us, Lew thought. He doesn’t care about this war, just like He didn’t care about the last one. But his head felt cottony, his thoughts blunted. Dick was, as always, decidedly clear-headed. And it was entirely possible, Lew decided, that he was mistaken, that God just didn’t care about Lewis Nixon. 

“It’ll be all right,” Dick said. 

Lew laughed, didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in it. Dick knew he couldn’t promise anything, that it was ludicrous even to try. You could tell by the set of his jaw, by the way he wouldn’t quite look Lew in the face. Yet he wanted so badly to promise, and to mean what he said. So Lew slid his hands out from under Dick’s more tenderly than he would have otherwise. He picked up his whiskey and drank it, and then, bleary-eyed, he let Dick kiss him. 

***

Lew had been uncertain how precisely Dick’s job offer would play out--if pressed, he guessed he’d have predicted a burst of early enthusiasm destined to peter out as Betsy realized the operation’s relative lack of glamour. Dick’s cramped office was hardly Madison Avenue, and there was precious little water-cooler gossip, unless you counted the boss’s personal life. What he hadn’t expected was for Betsy to take to the work like a fish to water, and take to Dick even more readily, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Dick liked to take people under his wing, and Lew had always been perplexed by his patience when he did so. The same man who couldn’t sit at a red light without twitching could comfort the soldier who’d just shot his own lieutenant by accident and never miss a beat.

He had a sense for what people could handle, and so long as you made an effort he’d be on your side to the last. Lew himself always seemed to pass muster, though there were days--hell, there were years--when he couldn’t fathom how. 

No, it wasn’t very long at all before Dick and Betsy were officially thick as thieves. Lew wasn’t sure quite how to feel about it, beset as he was every evening by the sight of them pulling up in Dick’s car, walking into the house laughing and engrossed in one topic or other. When he spoke to her he still felt as if he was talking past something, some stricture that caused his throat to narrow. 

“So,” he’d say, and then by the time he thought of a way to follow it up five minutes had passed and she was looking at him like he’d lost his marbles. 

“How’s Fred?” he asked one night at dinner. Odd as he found it to consider, their budding relationship at least made for a topic of conversation. 

She coughed into her napkin. “He’s fine,” she said, and went back to her chicken cutlet. 

“You seeing him this weekend?” 

She shrugged and set to divesting a broccoli stalk of its lumpen green head. 

“I, uh. I thought we might have him for dinner one night,” he said. He was half serious, half curious. He thought of Blanche on the phone, of what she’d do if she were here. Roll her eyes at him, probably. Dick watched him from across the table, his expression unreadable.

Betsy looked horrified, though he had to give her credit for her restraint. She looked hurriedly at her plate. 

“Forget it,” Lew said. “I was only kidding.” 

She froze as though stunned, and he had a split second to wonder what he’d done wrong before she gave a strange yelp like a dog that had been kicked, dropped her fork onto her plate and got up from the table. She hovered a moment, as though she meant to ask to be excused, then strode from the room without saying anything. 

In her wake Lew sat still and let the room focus around him again. “What the hell was that?” he asked at last. 

Dick, at least, had the good grace to look bemused. “I think you upset her,” he said. 

“Oh, you think so? I hadn’t noticed.” 

Dick screwed up his mouth; Lew got the feeling he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. 

“Get ahold of yourself,” Lew said, which only made Dick chuckle outright. 

“She was embarrassed,” he said. 

“I could’ve told you that,” Lew said. “Christ.” He scrubbed at his face. He felt abashed himself now not to have known what would happen, not to have realized her feelings were at stake or--damningly--not to have acknowledged it. 

“Well,” Dick said kindly. “It’ll be okay.” 

Don’t talk to me like you’d talk to her, Lew wanted to snap back, but he figured he ought to quit while he was ahead. He let Dick help him with the dishes and listened to a series of assorted muffled thumps from upstairs. Maybe she’s packing, he thought. Maybe she’ll drag her suitcase downstairs in the middle of the night. Eventually, though, the noises stopped, and when he slipped up later to investigate after Dick had gone to bed the second storey was entirely dark. 

He lay on the couch for a long time, not sleeping. When he drifted off at last he dreamed. For the first time in a long time he dreamed about the war, not the Ardennes as had been his habit but the beginning of the war, Normandy, roads and fields and beaches he’d never even seen, surf frothy with blood. Dick thought him fearless; that wasn’t quite true, for in Normandy he’d been afraid. Not for long, but long enough to remember. His fear was sharp then, a new hewn knife and France the whetstone. That had seemed cruel at the time: Lew loved France, but the place he floated into was nowhere he recognized. 

He couldn’t remember the particulars, only that he was on the ground, an infantryman, and he was running. In his head was the pervasive thought that he wasn’t supposed to be here, he was supposed to be somewhere else, and that he didn’t know what he was doing. For that was the root of real terror in war, wasn’t it: not to know where to plant your foot next. In the dream the ground was muddy, and he kept slipping. When he looked down at his body he saw that he was wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Great, he thought. I’ll freeze tonight. He kept running. He kept slipping. The ground turned red. 

He came to fractious and sweaty and half-convinced he was dead. He kicked out and caught the far arm of the couch, dislodging the cat, who had slipped in somehow in the night. He lay there and waited for his heart to slow, enjoying the exquisite relief of realizing he was awake. 

The next morning Betsy was leery of him, but she hung around the kitchen anyway, drinking her coffee and doing the crossword. 

“Why are you doing it in ballpoint?” he asked. “You’re only asking for trouble.” 

She ignored him. 

He sighed and poured himself a cup, heavy on the milk. “Look, I meant to say,” he started, and she looked up, put the pen in her mouth, looked down again. “I’m sorry about last night.” 

“What’s a six-letter word for fake?” she asked, hunched over the paper so her hair fell over her face. 

“Phoney?” 

“That’s five.” 

“With an e,” he said. 

“That sounds--wait. I don’t think it works with the across. Four letters, ‘josh’--oh! Razz.” 

Dick came into the kitchen then, his hair damp and out of place. If they’d been alone Lew might’ve dragged him over to the mirror or just fixed it himself, but they weren’t. He tried to gesture, but Dick just looked at him quizzically. 

“What’re we doing?” he asked, and something about the collectivity of the question caught Lew about the solar plexus. 

“Hey!” cried Betsy triumphantly. “Ersatz!”

“Crosswords,” Lew said, making an _et voila_ gesture. He’d been thrown by her earlier standoffishness, but now he found himself grinning at _ersatz._ Dick caught him at it and smiled too. He fetched himself a mug of coffee, pulled a chair out across from Betsy and sat down. 

“Lew loves those things,” he said. “Likes to show off his vocabulary.” 

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” Lew said. “That’s the Yale motto, in case you didn’t know. Want some toast?” 

Dick nodded. “Thanks.” Then, “Oh,” he added, in the afterthought sort of way one does when they know what they’re about to say isn’t an afterthought at all. 

Lew had sliced a couple of pieces of bread and was hovering over the toaster, and he found himself rolling his eyes. Affectionately, but even so. “Oh?” 

“We were thinking Betsy might learn to drive while she was here,” Dick said. 

“We were, were we,” Lew said. This time the word rankled, just slightly. 

“I’ll never learn in the city,” Betsy said, having laid aside her aloofness in the interest of getting something she evidently wanted. “Mother never drives, and Robert won’t teach me. I don’t want him to teach me. I want Dick to teach me. And you,” she added quickly. 

“I’m a lousy teacher,” Lew said. 

“He is not,” Dick said, though Lew was hard pressed to think of a time he’d taught Dick anything, except maybe how not to drink, or why not to get married. “Anyway,” Dick went on, “I thought we could take the car out later. The back roads should be nice and quiet. It’s a good place to learn.” 

Lew shrugged at the toaster. “Fine by me, I guess,” he said. “But if you wreck the car and put yourself in the hospital someone else is going to have to explain it all to your mother.” 

Before lunch they trooped out to the garage. Betsy made eyes at the MG, but they piled into Dick’s stolid Ford instead. “You should have seen his old car,” Lew said. “God, it was awful. He was so proud of it, though.” 

“It was a good buy,” Dick said, sounding wounded. “And anyway, you were perfectly happy driving it when you had no other choice.” 

“I’m not sure happy’s necessarily the right word.” 

Dick drove them until they left the busier byways behind. Lew relinquished the front seat to Betsy, sat in the back and watched the backs of their heads, the neat way Dick’s hair faded at the nape of his neck, Betsy’s thick, dark ponytail and the way it hung as she leaned against the window. 

“It’s stuffy in here,” she said, and she cranked the window down, put her hand out into the warm air and let the wind blow over it. Lew could feel it just watching, the way the air seemed to hit your fingers and part like water, and when he looked down at his lap he found he was moving his own fingers as if in sympathy, the way a pianist might play along to music. 

They pulled off on a gravel road and Dick let Betsy get behind the wheel, showed her how to turn the engine on under protest (I know how to turn a car on, I swear), the clutch, the brakes, the gas. 

“Can’t you just tell me while we’re driving?” she asked, eager to get underway. 

“No,” said Dick. “You’ve got to be prepared. Scout’s motto, right?” 

“Were you a boy scout?” she asked. 

“Can’t say I was,” Dick said. “When I was younger we lived too far out of town, and by the time we moved in I’d gotten onto other things. Sports, mostly.” 

“He comes by it naturally,” said Lew from the back seat. 

She twisted around to look at him. “Were you a boy scout, Dad?” 

Lew probably shouldn’t have laughed as loudly as he did. 

She drove them along the gravel road, down and back and down again, stuttering at first as she learned to work the clutch and then smoother, faster. His gut churned, ever so slightly. He thought they’d better swear her to secrecy; even Blanche would pass the story straight along to Kathy and then they’d all have had it. Dick was watching her watch the road, and he had a determined look on his face that matched hers.

***

Dick called from Fort Dix at odd hours. “I’m in the office,” he’d say, and Lew would always have to take a second and remember that at least part of the time Dick was sitting behind a desk supervising a training program, not out running up mountains or leaning out the great maw of a C-47. He wasn’t sure which he’d have preferred. 

“How’s it going?” Lew asked. He’d slopped a little whiskey on the kitchen table and was painting with it on the wood. He pinched the receiver between his ear and shoulder and drew a watery E. 

“Oh, it’s going. I feel like an old man,” Dick said. “I wonder if Sink felt like this, riding around in his Jeep. They’re so _young_.” 

“You’re thirty-two,” Lew said, putting his finger in his mouth. 

“Well, anyway,” Dick said, huffing into the receiver. “They seem like kids. Act like ‘em, too. Were we like that? We can’t have been like that.” 

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Lew said. Something about Dick’s incredulity grated. Maybe you had to be there. “And we probably were like that. Except for you, you were born middle-aged, apparently.” 

“I was not,” said Dick, sounding put out. He sighed. ‘I’ve got to go,” he said. “Bye, Lew.” 

“Bye.” 

When he couldn’t call he sent letters. 

_I know you’re letting my garden die off_ , Dick wrote. _I suppose I’ll be able to forgive you._

_About your garden--that’s where you’re wrong. The other night when it froze I put a quilt over the top of the bed. You’re welcome._

Blanche came down on Friday nights and had dinner with him. and the more she insisted she wasn’t fussing because Dick was gone the more he knew it to be true. He’d have thought it was about the drinking if she hadn’t indulged plenty herself, though he supposed if he thought about it there was generally a time she slid her glass away, put her hand over the top and said, _Oh, no, I couldn’t._ Not that that gave Lew pause--he was used to shutting a party down. And not that she ever begrudged him that next glass, after he inevitably shrugged and said _suit yourself, more for me_. 

“Tell me the truth,” he said once. “Dick put you up to this, didn’t he?” 

She swirled her wine around. This was early in the evening; they were putting off clearing the dinner plates. “Dick has to put me up to having dinner with you?” 

“Every week?” 

“We had dinner with Dad once a week.” 

“Yeah, but I always figured that was--” 

“An obligation?” 

He nodded. 

“Lew,” she said. “I’m only going to say this once, so commit it to memory, will you?” 

He rolled his eyes and gestured with his glass of whiskey. 

“When it comes to you, I’m not _obliged_ to do a damn thing.” She necked the rest of her wine. “We can take care of ourselves, and I know it because we did it for years. Dick might think you’re going to go to pieces, but I guess I’ve known you a little longer than he has. So I can ask you straight out: are you?” 

He took a drink, held the liquid in his mouth until it burned. “Shit, I don’t know.” 

“Well, try not to,” she said. “I don’t need Dick around to deal with you, but it would probably help.” 

“Better go stumping for war bonds again. Bring our soldiers home! Are we doing that this time? I don’t know. I don’t know about anything. I’m not sure Dick does either, you can tell when you talk to him.” He pushed his chair back and grabbed for her plate. “Here, gimme that. There’s ice cream in the freezer if you want it.” 

“No thank you,” she said. “It’s too cold out for ice cream.”

“Coffee, then?” 

She smiled. “I’ll come and help you with those if you put the pot on.” 

“Sorry I haven’t got a cook,” he said on the way into the kitchen. “Dick never wanted one.” 

“God, what a nightmare,” she said. “It’s a wonder you haven’t both wasted away entirely.” 

“Well, I know a thing or two about a bacon sandwich. And Dick can heat up soup.” 

He set the plates on the counter and turned the faucet on. The coffee pot was tucked in the corner, tin can of grounds next to it. He couldn’t remember when he’d last made a cup; he’d taken to going out once he was up, going into town for the paper and sitting at the lunch counter. The empty house felt haunted otherwise. 

She made a face at the prospect of canned soup, and he laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed, either. Last week, probably. Same place, same company. 

One Saturday he met Dick at an automat off the turnpike. It was early, just after nine in the morning, but Dick had to be back in the afternoon. Inside the place was shabby, cavernous and mostly empty. Two older men at separate tables, a family with a funereal air who didn’t look as though they were traveling for pleasure. They fetched packets of sandwiches from a glowing selection along the wall, pieces of pie, lurid cherry and gooey neon lemon. 

“This is awful,” said Lew, watching Dick inhale his food after a couple of weeks of Army chow. “You want it?” 

Dick nodded, mouth full, and Lew shoved the pie plate at him and turned his attention to coffee and a cigarette. He held the mug partway under the table and added a nip from his flask just to keep things interesting. 

Dick swallowed, eyed his watch conspicuously. “You doing that a lot?” 

“Doing what?” He slid the flask back into his coat pocket and held up his hands. “I don’t see a thing.” 

Dick didn’t reply, just blinked at him and poured some cream into his own coffee, looking annoyingly saintly in the anemic light. 

“Anyway, is that a rhetorical question? Come on, Dick, I think you know me a little better than to ask.” 

Leave it, he thought to himself. He couldn’t, though. He had the sudden urge to pick, to try and get Dick to say something. He didn’t quite know why. Maybe it was this place they were sitting in, purgatorial and silent but for the occasional dissonant clink of spoons and forks. 

Dick took a long sip of coffee, draining his cup to the dregs. He looked around for the waitress, who was standing in front of the building smoking, her foot propped like a doorstop as if that was all she needed to keep a lid on things. The coffee pot was up on the counter perched on its hot plate. Lew lit another cigarette. 

Dick turned away from the abandoned coffee pot to look off to one side, at that melancholic little family. The mother was cutting a sandwich into fourths; the toddler squealed; the baby had something all over its face. The father looked quietly desperate, like a salesman, and Lew decided he’d rather drink every bottle of whiskey in Middlesex County and drive his car through the plate-glass facade of this automat than ever look like that. 

“I had this crazy idea the other day,” Dick said. “At roll call.” 

“Oh?” 

“Yeah. I thought, what if I just walk away, go get in a Jeep and drive down to Washington and tell them I’m not going?” 

“You never would,” Lew said. “And even if you did, it wouldn’t matter.” 

Dick was still looking at that other table. He looked pale, and though Lew knew he’d been back at PT on base he seemed thinner, more drawn than he ever had in the old days. He had his elbow on the table, fist set against his chin. His hair still flamed, the brightest part of him now, and certainly the brightest thing in the room.

“No,” he said finally. “I guess I not.” He looked back at Lew. “You know, I miss having an intelligence officer in my back pocket,” he said. “Now I have to wait and find things out along with everyone else.”

“Must be tough.” 

Dick took a breath. “Nix--” 

The baby shrieked happily across the way. 

“Let’s go,” Lew said. “I can’t sit here any more.” 

Out in the parking lot they leaned against Lew’s car while he smoked a final cigarette. Dick watched somberly, his hands tucked in his pockets, uniform cap under one arm. “I got a letter from Speirs the other day,” he said. “He said he was on a train, on his way out west to ship out. That’s what I hear around base, that they’re staging everything out of Seattle.” 

Lew nodded. “Hope you like rain,” he said. “Hey, it’ll be just like England.” 

Dick continued as if Lew hadn’t spoken. “Word is we’ll have orders sooner rather than later.” 

“Okay,” Lew said. 

“Just thought you might like to know.” 

I wouldn’t, Lew thought, but instead of saying so he sucked at his smoke one more time and flicked it to the asphalt. “Well, keep me posted,” he said. 

“Of course,” Dick said. “Of course I will.” 

He was looking at Lew plaintively; the entire meeting had been charged with a kind of poignance Lew had neither the inclination nor the energy for. 

“Wire me when you know,” Lew said. He was getting awfully sick of telegrams. 

“I’ll come home before,” Dick said, as though it was a foregone conclusion. He must really be out to lunch if he thought anything was ever that certain in the Army. “I’ll say goodbye in person.” 

“Yeah. I’ll leave the light on for you.” 

***

Dick came into the kitchen late on a Friday. He was swinging his briefcase happily. “Your daughter,” he said, “is a first-class typist.” 

“Oh?” 

Lew was watching a pot of water on the stove. Little bubbles were beginning to cling to the bottom and sides, and he held a box of egg noodles in one hand, pitching it side to side like a maraca. Dick came into the kitchen behind him and he shut his eyes reflexively and waited for a touch, a kiss on the cheek that didn’t come. Instead Dick sidestepped him and opened the refrigerator to draw out out a bottle of milk. 

“She sure is,” Dick said. “She’s been showing me a thing or two, haven’t you?” 

Lew turned; Betsy had come in behind him. Dick fetched a couple of glasses from the cabinet and poured. 

“Well, the bar’s not set too high,” Lew said, unable to resist. He looked up at Betsy, who was hiding a grin in her glass of milk. “No offense,” he said. “But he’s a bit of a Luddite.” 

“A guy’s late with a couple of reports in the middle of a war and suddenly he doesn’t know his way around screwing in a lightbulb. How’s that a fair assessment?” 

“Hey, buddy, I was your boss for a solid couple of years. Let’s just say it’s a good thing we were an old-fashioned operation so you could write it all out longhand.” 

“Oh, that’s it--” 

Dick cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. Lew ducked and yelped a laugh before he could stop himself. He scrubbed a hand back through his hair and then tore the box of noodles open with his forefinger. He upended it into the water and shook a fall of salt in after. He didn’t look at Dick, ignored the pressing silence from Betsy’s side of the kitchen. When he did hazard a glance up at her, she’d finished her milk and gone over to the sink to rinse the glass out. She set it in the basin and plucked a slightly withered apple from the bowl on the countertop. 

“I think I’ll go say hello to the horses,” she said. She quit the kitchen without waiting for a response. Lew heard the screen door slap shut, heard her whistle for the dog. 

“Jesus, what are we doing?” Lew muttered. “That was--” 

“What?” 

He shook his head. Despite everything he felt full to bursting with the sum total of his life, but that was more than he felt he could say to Dick standing in the kitchen at six-thirty on an early August evening. Even now these things seemed to come out better in a murmur under cover of darkness. At any rate, he thought he must be obvious. He’d try and be better about it. They fell silent. After a few minutes Lew stuck a fork into the roiling pot of water and cast around for a noodle, drew one out dripping like a bear with a fish. 

“Taste this,” he demanded, brandishing his prize at Dick. “See if it’s _al dente_.” 

“You know I can never tell,” Dick said. He laid his hand over Lew’s on the fork, leaned in and took a bite.

Over dinner Lew revisited the subject of Betsy’s secretarial skills, eager to stage an interaction between the three of them that didn’t end with a ridiculous degree of flirtation between Dick and himself. They were eating quietly, Betsy pushing beef Stroganoff around her plate with a level of enthusiasm he was trying not to take personally. 

“So,” he said. “They teach you typing at St. Mary’s? I have to say, I’m surprised.”

She shrugged. “One of the librarians teaches it during the lunch hour,” she said. “Typing and shorthand. It isn’t mandatory.” 

“Bet you never thought you’d go in for an office job,” Lew said. From across the table Dick was watching him with the same sharp look he’d worn the night he offered Betsy the job in the first place. 

“Well, it’s like I said. You never know what might happen. Like the war,” she said. 

“Oh? How’s that?” 

“You never thought you were going to have to learn to shoot a gun or jump out of an airplane. But you did.” 

Dick set his fork down on his plate. The noise seemed overly loud, and it made Lew’s shoulders hunch up. “She’s right. You can end up all kinds of places you never imagined,” Dick said. “I think it’s smart, being prepared if you can.” 

“Well, sure,” said Lew. “It’s a little incongruous, is all.” 

“Ann took typing in high school,” said Dick. “My sister,” he said to Betsy. “Typing and shorthand and home economics.” 

“Home economics, Jesus. But look, that was at Lancaster Senior High or something. It’s not exactly--” 

“Not exactly what?” 

“She’s going to go to college, Dick. St. Mary’s girls go to Barnard or Vassar or Radcliffe, or--”

“Or maybe I won’t,” said Betsy imperiously. “Maybe I’ll get a job in the city instead. Dick can give me a reference.” 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lew said. 

“Sure I will,” said Dick, as if Lew hadn’t spoken. He was smiling at her, a smile Lew hadn’t seen him wear before, indulgent and paternal. 

“Oh, you won’t either,” Lew said, and tossed his napkin onto his plate. “You’re not her goddamn father.” 

Betsy shoved her chair back from the table with a screech and leapt to her feet. “I’m going upstairs,” she said thickly. 

“Betsy, sit back down.”

“No,” she said. “No! You--you act as if you know me. You don’t know me! Not at all. None of you do. You just carry on as if you do, as if you’re just absolutely certain of every last thing, and nobody ever stops to talk to me or ask me what I want!”

“Look--” 

“And you’re not my father either, not really. You wanted it that way. So you can just--just go to hell!”

Her face was white with rage, her whole body quivering. He was stunned as if he’d been slapped, and he sat staring dumbly as she burst into tears, clapped her hands over her face and finally fled the dining room. 

“Betsy, wait,” Dick said, but she wouldn’t, a fact that made Lew feel ever so slightly better.

Dick sighed angrily. He dropped his own napkin onto the table and pushed his plate away, not bothering to keep the movements measured or quiet. He had that coiled anger about him again, and Lew found himself wondering if it dwelled in him all the time or if he could call it in from the ether on special occasions. 

“You know,” Dick said, “you’ve always acted as if your family was some kind of foregone conclusion. Blanche does it too, you both do, and I’ve never understood why. But it’s a safety net, isn’t it?” 

“What’s my family got to do with anything?” 

“You do it by rote, everything that’s got Nixon written on it.” 

“Oh, come on,” Lew said lamely, but Dick was relentless. 

“Yale,” he continued, holding out his long fingers to tick off one by one. “Drinking. The nitration works. Whichever finishing school you send Betsy off to. And it gives you a heck of a good excuse when things go wrong. You can be anyone you want to be with Betsy, but you’re sure you’ve got to be your father’s son, the same scared guy you were back when Kathy sent you that letter.” 

“You calling me a coward?” 

The biggest speech Dick had made as long as they’d known each other, and all Lew could come back with was that. Case in fucking point, for all that Dick looked too stung to enjoy being right. 

Dick shook his head, gave a muffled, incredulous laugh. “No,” he said. “You’re the bravest man I ever met. But you’re terrified of her.” 

And there was nothing else to do then but to get up from the table himself. Lew felt seen, known unrelentingly, the feeling a fraternal twin of his earlier satisfaction in the kitchen. This was the way the other shoe dropped, and all of a sudden he’d rather be alone when it did. 

“Put the dishes in the sink, will you?” 

“Where are you going?” 

“Out.” He sounded terse and felt shitty about it, found himself unable to be cruel even in the grip of self-righteousness. “Just for a drive,” he amended. “Just to clear my head.” 

“Lew, I didn't mean--”

“Forget it.” 

He went out through the kitchen, and as he did he stopped at the refrigerator and took up the bottle of white wine, hefting it by the neck like a club.

The MG never quite roared to life; it was more of an excitable sputter, but Lew was gratified anyway. In the car he darted down the driveway toward the navy and pink horizon, Buster a pied smudge in the rearview mirror until the car’s pace outstripped him and he stood in the lane, yawping. 

Lew felt a little wild, as though he too might yawp. He was rather used to sticking around now, so much so that to run felt novel and also like the precise state of being in which to consider what Dick had said--because he might not stay and listen but he’d damn well think about it, which was probably the biggest difference between Lewis Nixons past and present. Not that he’d tallied it up, not that he cared; it was only that Dick got so damn tenderhearted over self-improvement. 

He had the wine bottle wedged between his thighs, colder and more cumbersome than his old flask had been. He still had it, tucked away in a trunk somewhere. An ex-drunk’s lore held he ought to throw it into a river, cast it into a bonfire, have it melted down and made into some token of sobriety. But Lew liked the thing too much, and anyway, sometimes he liked to look at it and trace his initials in their curly script and sometimes he liked to stick his nose in the bottle and let the smell conjure what it would, pot luck. 

Dick said drinking had been easy, and sure, everyone drank, and sure it was easy once he’d started to keep on, but for Lew drinking had always been a dice game first and foremost. Sometimes you got Ron Speirs beside him on Hitler’s patio furniture or Dick driving him up a mountain in Austria and kissing him in a grove full of ferns or the rare convivial holiday when every Nixon was just the right sort of warmly soused. That was the right roll. Roll wrong and you got a faceful of Oriental rug and a sour mouthful of vomit, you got a hail of German teashop glass, you got Dick with a hangdog look, you got Stanhope Nixon bashing some dumb kid’s head in. 

Even on the bad nights the thrill and the drama had appealed to him, and so most of the time the odds had been worth it. To think so, he felt certain, must mean he was doing something wrong. “I’m not the church basement type,” he told Dick once, and Dick hadn’t said anything except to nod as if to say, that’s fine. The thing about it was that by the time the odds stopped being worth it Lew was betting on the spread, not whether he’d win or lose but just how much he’d lose by, how much would be left when the drink was done with him. 

On the highway he was the only one on the road. He had the top down and the warm wind buffeted him about, silken and violent. He had one hand on the steering wheel and one around the neck of the bottle, cold and smooth, the color of algae. 

He took Dick to the beach once, to a lonely beach where nobody looked at you. They held hands and traced the ribbony tideline down a mile or more combing for shells and for bits of tumbled seaglass. They found a bottle then, too, empty and choked with sand. Dick picked it up, shook it out and held it to one eye like a spyglass. 

“Let’s put a note in it and throw it back in,” he said. “I did that once when I was a kid.” 

“Hate to say, it’ll be back up here with the next high tide. But sure, you can write me a love note if you want. I’ll come and pick it up tomorrow. Or you could just mail it. Or you could just tell me.”

Dick laughed and lobbed the bottle down the pale grey sand instead, where it landed soft enough it didn’t even shatter. A good roll, that day. Lew had had his flask in his back pocket the whole time, gut warm with liquor. But you could comb through stormwrack after a hurricane, your house gone and your lover drowned. You could find a thousand bottles and a thousand love notes, and your Bible, and an album of photographs, and you could tell yourself you hadn’t lost everything. 

In the car he lifted the wine again. Its weight felt good in his hand, the wind a slipstream around his face. He put the bottle to his lips and took one last vinegary gulp, and then he floored the gas, let the car drift into the middle of the road. He held the bottle above his head a second like a standard, cranked his arm back and hurled it into the gloaming. 

He slowed down after that, and kept to his lane. He felt more responsible already. He made the next town over and pulled into an ice cream stand, still open, kids in orbit around it like fireflies. He bought a chocolate shake for himself and a strawberry one for Dick, and laughed a little as he handed over his money. The girl in the window gave him an odd look. 

“Inside joke,” he said. 

She didn’t answer, just turned away and opened the register. She looked about Betsy’s age, and she had that same look on her face, the one that said she’d know more than he ever would, that she would one day possess an understanding of the world that would both astonish and threaten him. Again he felt old, and a little clumsy, and when he went back to the convertible, straw in his mouth, ice cream chasing out the tang of wine, he felt the same embarrassment he had watching Betsy go off on her date. 

When he got home Dick was sitting on the porch swing, casting himself back and forth on a toe.

“Hey,” he said. 

“Hey,” said Lew. “I got you dessert. Might be melted, though.” 

Dick took a sip. “Strawberry?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Lew said, settling beside him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” 

“How was your drive?” 

“Oh, it was fine,” Lew said. He could feel Dick watching him. He stared into space and didn’t watch anything except the haze of gnats in the porchlight. 

“You get what you needed?” 

“You mean besides this?” He held up his milkshake. He sighed. “I guess so. You can ask again, if you want to. About the--the safety net. I thought about it a little.” 

“Oh,” Dick said. “I wasn’t--” 

“Of course you weren’t. You were going to leave it for our next big watershed moment. I guess we’re about due for another of those, aren’t we. Unless this was it, but it seemed a short on fireworks.” 

“Well, you did storm out of the house. You didn’t hit a deer, though. Did you?” Dick craned his neck at the car, a glob of shadow where Lew had parked it under the maple tree. 

“No deer this time. But I did take out some bugs on the windshield. A real massacre.” He slid closer to Dick, so their shoulders were touching. “Anyway.” 

“We really don’t have to talk about it,” Dick said. 

“Look, I was an ass before. I’m sorry.” 

“I don’t think you owe me the apology,” Dick said. 

“You’re the one who’s here. I’m making the rounds, though.” 

Dick smiled. He had a fleck of strawberry milkshake on his lip. “Good.” 

Lew had the vague thought that he should be angrier, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to muster up the feeling. He’d spent it all earlier, he supposed, at the dinner table and then out on the road. Now all he wanted was to go inside and go to sleep together. But first he wanted to kiss Dick, on account of the stray milkshake. 

“Jesus,” Lew said. He forced a breath out between his teeth. “What the hell am I doing?” 

“I don’t know,” Dick said. “Your best.” 

“That’s optimistic.” 

Dick shrugged. 

Fuck it. He’d had a bad start to the night, and now here Dick was being kind and charitable and all the rest of it, as always more than Lew deserved and less than he’d ever expected. He leaned over and grabbed Dick by the front of the shirt.

“Lew,” Dick started. “I don’t think--”

“Just a second,” Lew said. “Just a second.”

Dick sighed, sounding briefly as though he wanted to argue. He didn’t, so Lew kissed him before either of them could think better of it. Dick’s tongue was cold and still sweet with ice cream. Lew meant at first to kiss him sweetly enough to match but now he was here he didn’t see why he shouldn’t lick, shouldn’t bite, and anyway Dick seemed to expect he would, the way he opened his mouth wide against Lew’s, the way he hung onto Lew’s shirt the same way Lew did his. Dick broke away and bit at Lew’s neck, breath hot, coming quicker now. 

That was another thing that had surprised him about Dick, once upon a time--how changeable he was, how he could go from steadfast and calm to beside himself with the judicious application of Lew’s hands, his mouth. It turned out Dick Winters was just as susceptible to the pleasures of the flesh as anyone. A better puritan than Lew might have been disappointed, but Lew was just happy he didn’t have to feel too badly about his own appetites. Ironic, considering just this, just Dick’s lips on the line of Lew’s jaw was a greater transgression than Lew had ever imagined. 

Long ago Dick told him wonderingly about stealing up on a pair of GIs on his troopship back to the States. Lew still remembered how he’d sounded talking about it, a little excited that there’d been another couple of guys like them and simultaneously a little afraid of it. I should’ve turned them in, he’d said. He never would have done it. Dick could never abide rules he thought were stupid, and Lew had the feeling that in the Army he had occasionally walked a fine line between principle and martyrdom. No, had they been caught Dick would’ve held the whole affair in the same contempt he had Sobel’s court-martial--only he probably wouldn’t have been cooling his heels as a mess officer if they’d been caught _en flagrante._

Lew flattened his palm against Dick’s chest, the better to feel his heart, the straighter the line down to the waistband of his trousers. Dick shifted minutely on the swing, the v of his legs widening just enough for Lew make an educated guess at the state of things below the belt. He drummed his fingers against Dick’s sternum. 

“Not here,” Dick said, sounding a little broken up about it. 

“I know,” Lew said. “But I had an idea the other day. Wait here, will you?” He moved his hand lower by way of encouragement and gave Dick an anticipatory squeeze. 

“God,” Dick said quietly, which Lew took to mean that he’d wait, but that Lew had better be quick about it. He thought he could manage. He went into the house, and it was only the sudden recollection of Betsy upstairs that stopped him galloping up to Dick’s room. He went up as softly as he could manage, looking for a sliver of light beneath her door to tell him she was still awake, that all of this was rash and foolish and he and Dick should play at young lovers another day. But there was no light there, and so there was no deterrent to Lew stealing into the erstwhile second bedroom, yanking the quilt off of the bed and rifling in a drawer or two. He slipped a tin of Vaseline into his pocket and slung the quilt over his shoulder and snuck back down the stairs and out the front door. Dick was waiting dutifully on the porch swing. When he saw the quilt he stifled a laugh. 

“You’re kidding,” he said. 

“Serious as a heart attack. Where’s the flashlight?” 

They made their way down the field, stumbling softly against one another, following the beam of the flashlight like a will o’ the wisp. Lew thought they ought to be drunk, that this was the sort of thing you did when you were drunk, only they never had. The closest they’d come was V-E Day, maybe, when they’d kissed on the balcony in their grand billet, right out there in the open, and pretended they hadn't first scanned the street below. There was a wildness to tonight Lew mostly remembered from the war, a gladness to be alive, and he’d think that maybe it was only him feeling it except that Dick was crashing through the fragrant weeds right alongside him, kept catching him around the waist or around the wrist and pulling him close, swaying as though they were dancing. 

“You’re going to trip me,” Lew said, the third or so time they nearly went down together. 

“Maybe that’s the point,” Dick said. “Get this show on the road. Where are we going, anyway, on a hike?” 

“Don’t be so impatient.” 

“I’ve missed you.” 

“You live with me.” 

“So?”

Lew grinned into the dark. “I’ve missed you too.” 

***

“I’ve missed you,” Dick said. 

They were in the doorway of the old house. Dick had his uniform on, Dick had a duffle bag slung over one shoulder and a hat Lew wanted to rip off and step on, grind into the mud outside. The duffle was full. Dick wasn’t home on a pass, no, not this weekend. Dick was leaving. Lew was drunk. Lew couldn’t quite see. Well, that was a lie, he could see Dick as through a long and dim tunnel, which was better anyway, because Dick sure cut a dashing figure in olive drab but it was one Lew would really rather never look at again. To tell the truth. 

“I can take it off,” Dick said. “If we’re just going to be home.” 

“Fuck this place,” said Lew, and went into the living room to pour himself a drink. 

They did go out later, because Dick said he was hungry, said he wanted the vegetable soup with the alphabet noodles from the diner and a grilled cheese and a piece of pie and who knows what the food’s like over there, Lew, and Lew didn’t know what he said back because he didn’t care. 

“Are you all right?” 

Of course he was all right. Dick looked damned handsome in that uniform, was the hell of it. 

“I--I think she saw you pour that in your coffee just now.” 

He didn’t care. He’d drink straight from the source if he liked. He was a paying customer, goddammit. He took the flask out and set it on top of the formica with a crack. She see that, Dick?

Dick pushed his plate away. “Let’s get you home, huh?” 

Sure, let’s get me home. 

***

The barn, when they got there, made Dick laugh. “This was your idea?” 

“Sure, why not? It’s atmospheric.” 

“It’s more atmospheric if you didn’t grow up shoveling manure every morning.” 

Lew snorted. “Indulge me.” 

He flung the flashlight beam across the ceiling. Up in the rafters sometimes he caught the odd owl, face a white circle, moonstone eyes glowing green. One spring they had an honest-to-God nest and two ashen fledglings, but tonight the top of the barn was empty, its denizens out coursing. The horses were pastured, the dog was up at the house. Nobody here but the two of them and the mice. 

“Where?” Dick asked. “Up in the hayloft?” 

“Sure. You know, we should’ve started this whole thing up a lot sooner over there. Think of all the scenic European farmsteads we could’ve defiled.” 

“What, you never did it in a hayloft before?” 

“No, I--wait, what?” 

Dick just smiled, that damn jerky half-smile of his, like he had a fish-hook in the corner of his mouth. Then he turned and started up the ladder. 

“You’re full of it,” Lew said as he followed. “You never did it in a hayloft either. You’d have told me, for one thing.”

“You think I’d kiss and tell?” 

He wouldn’t, damn him.

Lew hauled himself off the top rung of the ladder, hands slipping through the crisp hay. Hay was nice to look at, he thought, and there was metaphor in the way it grew, soft at a distance but ready to poke and spear up close. He liked the cakelike rounds carved from the golden fields in the autumn. He liked the thought of their quilt laid out up here in the quiet, where the assembled bales soaked the sound up like the stone walls of a cathedral. 

He felt along the wall for a nail and hung the flashlight up. There was an overhead bulb, but it buzzed, and anyway it wasn’t much stronger than the flashlight beam. 

They spread the quilt out and Dick undressed and lay on top of it, watching Lew with amusement as he took his own clothes off. 

“What?” 

“Nothing,” Dick said. “Come down here, will you?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” 

Lew fished the Vaseline tin out of his pants pocket and tossed it at Dick, who caught it neatly. “Putting me in charge?” 

“Don’t sound so shocked.” He folded his pants and his shirt with uncharacteristic attention to detail. 

“Look, you can’t just say that and then hang around folding your laundry. Quit fussing and come down here, for Pete’s sake.” 

Lew snorted. He abandoned his efforts, balling his clothes up and tossing them into a corner of the loft. He lay on the quilt next to Dick on his side. Dick put a hand on Lew’s ribcage, ran it up and down the way he usually got started. Dick was a careful lover when given the reins, thorough and methodical. Lew appreciated it in the right frame of mind, but there were times when it made him feel as though Dick had remembered all about him, was remembering even as he touched Lew that he was breakable, that he’d done so once and might again. 

The night before he left for Korea Dick had taken him upstairs and laid him out just like this. Above him Dick lurched in and out of his eyeline as Lew watched with detached curiosity. He felt Dick’s hands on him, felt him grope and cajole his body, felt the tenor of his movements change as Lew’s recalcitrant physiology frustrated him. But Lew was past frustration now, and as his cock flopped limply in Dick’s hand he himself flopped back against the pillow and watched the ceiling take up a clumsy counterclockwise oscillation. 

“It’s not working,” Dick said distantly. 

It doesn’t matter, Lew thought, or maybe said aloud, because abruptly Dick’s face was very close to his. He looked a little angry, a little desperate, a little sad. He was sweating. “Please,” he said, as though Lew was merely holding out on him. “Lew. I’m going tomorrow.” 

That’s right. You are. Somewhere beneath the clotted wet stuffing that comprised his heart, his brain, his insides lived a black and simmering feeling. He hated Dick, though not enough to move, not enough to dissuade his hand from where it probed between his legs. There, Dick didn’t need his cooperation. But he was good, Dick was, too good to take advantage. 

“Do it anyway,” Lew said. 

“But--”

“I don’t care.” 

“But I don’t--”

“Fuck me,” Lew said. “That what you wanted me to say?”

It wasn’t, and he well knew it. But Dick, as it happened, was only human. He wanted Lew, and he wanted permission. And Lew hated Dick, he swore he did, but not enough not to give him what he wanted. It didn’t hurt, Dick made sure of that. But it didn’t feel good, either, because Dick couldn’t fuck the drink out of him. 

When he was old his arms and legs would sing with neuropathy and he’d think it was ironic. The doctor would tell him that alcohol stretched your heart out, made the chambers and valves and the miles of pipe flowing forth after them lax and incompetent, and that was funny, that was a goddamn joke, and all those years later Lew would laugh on the exam table because that feeling, that broken and bloated slump towards death, was so intimately and terribly familiar. 

Above him Dick motored on faithfully, hands on Lew’s face. He was breathing fast, and in between he was talking. He was saying he was sorry. Lew hated him, and in a moment he would tell him so, in a moment he would tell him if you’re leaving, don’t come back.

***

In the barn Lew kept his eyes open. Dick was on top of him, braced on his hands, his hips pinned between Lew’s thighs. He closed his eyes. Lew watched him, stroking himself idly. Dick made the same damn face every time, like he was doing long division. He pushed inside Lew and stilled. 

“Okay?” he asked, because he always did, fifty times or so. 

“Yeah, I’m okay.” Lew turned his head and found Dick’s forearm with his mouth. It was funny, he thought, how one expanse of skin was just as good as another when it came to kissing, though he had come to appreciate the hollow of Dick’s left elbow, its stray woodchip freckles, its blue veins.

“I wanted to say, before,” Lew started. 

“Huh?” 

Before he could answer, Dick shifted. It felt good. Distracting. They sighed the feeling out together. Dick smiled, not the fish-hook smile but a real grin, and then he lowered himself to the ground on his elbows. He kissed Lew, combed his hair back off his forehead as though settling in, as though he’d arrived at some long-sought destination and now meant to stay awhile. Lew bent his knee and slid it into the small of Dick’s back. He felt overfull, his muscles strung with tension. 

“You were right,” Dick said. “This is atmospheric.” 

“I’m always right,” huffed Lew. 

“Hmm,” Dick said, somehow managing to sound both skeptical and fond. 

It was a blatant lie, but one they’d doubtless play at now, for it conjured the kind of goodness they both knew to be the best of them. And anyway, Lew reasoned, he could think of enough caveats to turn the statement true, even if he ended up at _I’m always right about fucking in a hayloft in the summer in the year of our Lord nineteen fifty-seven._

“Better kiss me again,” Lew said. “It’s a safer bet than talking, all around.” 

“Well, you’re definitely right about that.” 

Lew didn’t think again of what he’d wanted to say until later, when he’d gathered Dick against him and was thinking with mild irritation that he should’ve brought a second quilt. 

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, trying to drag as much of the quilt as he could over their bare legs.

“Mmm. No, it’s hot out. Quit moving, would you?” 

“We should go back to the house,” Lew said. 

“Five minutes,” said Dick, twisting a lock of Lew’s hair around his index finger. 

“Don’t fall asleep,” Lew said mildly. 

Dick’s body seemed to grow heavier by way of reply, and his breathing slowed as he began to drowse. Typical. Lew kissed him on the forehead. As he lay there in the dim light, Dick tucked up under his arm, he thought of the wine bottle shattered out there on the road somewhere, of other nights years ago when he’d been intent on shattering all kinds of things. 

The night Dick came back from the Army for good, he found Lew tucked in the alley between their bed and the closet, the same warren he’d lived in for days. 

After Dick left Lew had woken up much too late; he had a vague recollection of Dick trying to rouse him, trying to say goodbye, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or open his eyes. By the time he had regained consciousness, slipped from the bed to the floor and dragged the comforter down on top of him he was forced to acknowledge that it was more that he _wouldn’t_ do any of those things, and neither would Dick beg him to. So he’d left, just like that, back to Fort Dix and then on to a troop train bound for where-the-fuck-ever. Seattle, if Speirs had it right. Lew lay still and listened to the oppressive silence of the empty house long enough to conclude that he was, in fact, alone. 

Good, he thought. Good. 

He got up shakily and staggered to the head, the effort of the walk enough to make him bend at the waist and hurl, splattering the toilet bowl with vomit. He slumped against the seat. His mouth flooded with saliva and he spat, waited until he was certain nothing else was forthcoming before he unrolled a quantity of toilet paper and wiped his mouth. Then he got to his feet again and pissed into the mess, flushed--because he wasn’t a heathen--and returned to the bedroom. Last night’s bottle of whiskey was still on the nightstand and still blessedly half-full, and he washed the taste of puke out of his mouth with a fortifying swig. He bore the bottle down with him into the bedclothes, cradling it like a baby, and drank until he went to sleep again. 

As it turned out Lew’s saving grace was mostly his predilection for sleep over alcohol, slim victory though it was. Time passed like a dream, and when he came to and saw a long figure resolve at the foot of the bed he assumed that was what it was, a dream that was especially nice or especially cruel depending on how you looked at it. Both, Lew decided. 

“Hi,” he said to Dick’s ghost, which was an incredible likeness judging by the face it made. 

“Jesus Christ,” it said, and in a heartbeat it knelt by Lew’s side, hauled him up by the armpits and embraced him, brushed his hair back off his face. 

“How long have you been like this?” it said. “I tried to call.” It even smelled like Dick, like his aftershave. It did seem clean for the Army, though Dick had always been that way, neat as a damn pin. 

“You’re supposed to be halfway to hell and gone by now,” Lew said. 

“They let me stay,” the ghost said breathlessly. “They let me stay.” The ghost cupped Lew’s face in its hands and kissed him, which was when he began to wonder. For like as not Lew’s masochistic brain would’ve had the ghost lay into him, smack him senseless or say something Dick never would, something mean, something Lew probably deserved. 

“Shit, that calls for a party,” he said. 

The ghost laughed. Probably in spite of things, because it still had that look on its face. “Seems like you already had one.” 

“Nah, parties are fun.” Lew licked his lips. His mouth tasted rancid, and he was embarrassed that maybe-Dick was so close, had touched this foul mouth with his own. “Wait,” he said. “Are you really here?” 

“Oh, Lew.” 

Dick--hell, call him Dick; if he wasn’t Lew had bigger things to worry about--slung Lew’s arm over his shoulder. “Come on.” 

They went into the bathroom. Lew sat on the toilet and watched Dick run a bath for him as though he was a child. “Get in,” Dick said, and so he did. The water was steaming, and all over Lew’s skin flared to life as though coming in from the cold. He stung with tiny, nigh-invisible cuts; his shins were purpled with strange bruises. 

“What’ve you been doing?” Dick muttered, but Lew couldn’t say.

Dick drew a washcloth through the bathwater and wrung it over Lew’s back, skated a new bar of soap across his chest and wet his hair and lathered it, moving his head back and forth, fingers roaming his scalp as though checking for hidden injury. Lew let his eyes close. He could sleep again, he thought. Right here, just like this. He’d slept for days and it was as if he’d got no rest at all. But he could now, here with the bath warm and innervating as coffee, Dick scratching along his hairline. It felt wonderful. It was a dream. 

He let Dick help him out of the bathtub and into a robe and slippers and down into the kitchen. He sat in silence as Dick bustled at the other end of the room, finally producing a bowl of chicken soup with rice. 

“Campbell’s finest,” he said. He sounded uneasy. 

The soup looked unappealing, pale yellow and congealed, but Lew took up his spoon anyway. “Thanks,” he said, and ate. When he was finished Dick took the bowl to the sink dutifully, as though disentangling Lew step by step from whatever unsavory bindings he’d fashioned himself held some unlikely sort of appeal. 

“How long are we going to keep doing this?” Lew asked. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears; it had been days since he’d talked so much. Dick’s back was turned, the water running, and he didn’t turn around to answer. 

“Doing what?” 

“Come on, Dick.” Lew sighed. “I--I told you not to come back.” He hadn’t quite remembered until just now, though the words must have been there anyway, lingering noxiously in the back of his mind.

Dick did turn then, and it was only now, clean and full of soup, that Lew could see that it was really him. More than that: how tired he looked, how diminished. His body was propped against the countertop as though it might fold. 

“Please,” he said. “Not tonight.” 

Maybe, thought Lew, he really had expected a party.

They went upstairs. Dick shut himself in the bathroom to take a shower while Lew changed the sheets. When Dick emerged, scoured and pink, it was easy to forget that anything had happened, to pretend he hadn’t mostly been missing these last few months, that Lew hadn’t been slowly flaking apart. Dick didn’t try to touch him. He just lay in bed in parallel, hands crossed on his chest like a linen-wrapped pharoah until both of them fell asleep. 

***

Lew didn’t know how long he slept for, only that he opened his eyes sometime later to the same dauntless triangle of flashlight beam and his cheek pressed against Dick’s back. There was something else, though, some minute disturbance of air or sound that must have roused him. He lay still for a time and watched the wall opposite the cramped, hand-hewn window some long-ago carpenter had tucked in under the awning. As he watched, his eyes unfocused, there came a dimly perceptible pulse of light. Red, hazy through the haydust that hung in the night air. Then gone. Then red again. 

He sat up. 

“Hey,” he said, grabbing Dick by the shoulder. 

“Huh?” 

“Get up and get dressed,” he said. “Come on.” 

They dressed awkwardly beneath the low ceiling, Dick slower than he should have been and the scene all the more disconcerting for it. Lew peered out the window, trying and failing to get a better look. Dick clapped him on the shoulder when he was ready and they clambered down the ladder, Dick first, Lew a couple paces back like always. They left the light behind in their hurry, but when they came out of the barn they saw it didn’t matter. Up by the house was a black and white patrol car, its roof light rolling against the house, the trees, the cloud cover. The porchlights still burned. As they stood and watched another car pulled in behind the black-and-white: Lew’s little red MG. 

“You’re shitting me,” Lew muttered. 

“What do you think--” 

“I don’t know,” Lew said. “I just know it’s a fuckup.” Beside him Dick looked pallid, his face an intermittent sickly pink. 

“Just c’mon,” Lew said, and started back across the field. 

The policeman stood on the porch; having rung the bell and received no reply he was clearly at a loss, and now hung about with his hands in his pockets. As they drew closer Lew found he recognized him; he was a young guy, new on the force and usually set up at the traffic stop on the way into town. He’d pulled Lew over once when he hadn’t been paying attention and came down the hill too fast. He’d been so nervous as he wrote out the ticket Lew almost felt sorry for him. 

“Evening,” Lew called. “Officer…Stanton, is it?” 

He felt it was important to be jovial; in dealing with the police he had the rich man’s assurance that the law was on his side coupled with a ne’er-do-well’s innate suspicion that at last the jig was up. 

“That’s right,” said the policeman. “Evening, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Winters.” 

“What brings you all the way out here, Officer Stanton?” 

“I think I found something that belongs to you,” Stanton said. He nodded at the MG. “I pulled them over off Highway 28,” he said. “Going a little fast. I was going to let ‘em off with a warning, but I recognized the car. You can get out now,” he called. 

At his order the rear passenger door of the black-and-white and the driver’s side of the MG opened with arthritic slowness, the former producing Betsy and the latter a very chastened Fred Olmstead. 

“It was my idea, sir,” said Fred immediately. “I put her up to it.” 

Betsy glared at him, and said nothing. 

“Quiet,” said Stanton. “She was driving,” he offered. “Without a license.” 

Lew resisted the urge to shoot a look at Dick. “Where were you going?” was all he could think to ask her. 

She blushed. “Just--around,” she said. 

“Christ,” he muttered. He ran a hand back through his hair. He had a mind to yell, to demand what she’d been thinking, but he still had that old Nixon sense of decorum clinging to him like a cobweb. Kathy would be proud, he thought.

“Will you be...I don’t know, pressing charges?” he asked Stanton, his tone implying that this whole conversation was destined from the get-go to be a formality, drivers’ licenses notwithstanding. 

“Well, it’s your car, Mr. Nixon. So unless you want to charge Miss Nixon with theft…” 

“Not especially,” Lew said. Stanton looked as though he understood, while being ever so slightly disappointed. Betsy looked as though she wanted to take off all their heads, with the possible exception of Dick. 

“As it’s a first offense, I suppose the warning might still apply,” continued Stanton. “I guess there’s a case to be made for kidnapping--” 

Fred yelped. _“What?”_

“--But probably not the strongest.” 

Lew couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking; he seemed the sort to read the state penal code for fun. 

“Fred,” said Lew, “Were you kidnapping my daughter?” 

“No, sir,” said Fred, looking pale. 

“Good,” said Lew. “Betsy, go inside.” 

“But--” 

_“Betsy.”_

“Fine,” she said. “But he _didn’t_ put me up to it.” 

She shot another look at Fred. Then she clutched her purse to her chest and cantered up the steps to the house, Fred looking after her with a moony expression. Goddammit, thought Lew. Later he’d ascribe his reaction to the fact of Dick’s presence next to him, to residual warm feelings over their evening in the hayloft. It would only be partway true, but enough was as good as a piece. 

“Can you get him home?” he asked, nodding at Fred. “Walk him up to the front door, will you?” 

“Sure can, Mr. Nixon.” 

Fred set his jaw. Sorry, kid, thought Lew. “Great,” he said. “I think I’ll take it from here, in that case.” 

“That’ll be fine,” said Stanton. He came down off the porch, opened the back of the patrol car to accept Fred, who slid inside. Stanton turned back to face them. “Say,” he said, as though the thought was only just occurring. “What were you two doing out in the barn this time of night?” 

“Oh,” Dick said, speaking for the first time since they’d come up to the house. “One of the horses was colicking. Mr. Nixon was giving me a hand.” 

Stanton looked troubled. “You need the vet?” 

“I think we’ve got it handled,” Dick said. “But thanks.” 

“Anytime. Well, I guess I’ll get Fred home.” 

“Thanks,” Lew said. “And sorry for the trouble.” 

As the patrol car retreated down the drive Lew stood on the porch and watched, vaguely aware of Dick behind him. “Lew?” Dick ventured, once the car’s tail lights had disappeared into the dark. 

Lew turned. He felt as though he might wake up any minute and find himself still sleeping up in the loft. “Huh?” he asked. 

“You all right?” 

“Did that really just happen?” 

“I’m pretty sure,” Dick said, running a hand over his face. When he had his wits about him again Lew would have to commend him on his quick thinking. He looked as if he’d been walking a horse, fretting in the heat of the barn. His hair was mussed, shirt and trousers slightly askew. He looked like someone who’d been roused from bed, so Lew could only guess at his own appearance. 

“I should go in and talk to her,” Lew said. 

He eyed the house warily. He wasn’t exactly relishing the conversation, nor did he harbor any illusions that Betsy had spent the last several minutes doing anything other than listening intently to proceedings outside. 

“Yeah,” Dick said. “You want help?” 

“I get the feeling I’m on my own,” Lew said. “But listen. You were right earlier. About Betsy, and about the rest of it.” 

Dick looked faintly surprised at the admission. Not because he thought he was wrong; probably because he’d thought it would have been a little more like pulling teeth. “Was I?” 

“Yeah. I meant to tell you before.” 

Dick stepped close to him and laid his hand on Lew’s shoulder, a chaste concession to Betsy’s proximity before he moved to go inside. Lew followed, and contemplated the back of Dick’s neck. 

Familiar territory, but truth be told there were times when Lew forgot the depth and breadth of what they’d become to one another, the trappings of partnership they’d collected. From time to time he looked at Dick and saw only those first days back at Fort Benning, the war still heady, Dick’s friendship the same, back before Lew knew anything about anything. 

Sure enough, his entry into the house revealed Betsy sitting on the sofa, her cheeks tearstained but her face no less fierce for it. He loved her then, his daughter. He supposed he’d loved her before, in an obligatory and custodial way. But later he would remember it as the first time he looked at her and thought it, with heart-pounding certainty.

“What have you go to say for yourself?” he asked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dick retreat upstairs. 

Betsy shrugged. The gesture carried a theatric sheen of emphasis. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “Can we talk about it in the morning?” 

“No, we can’t talk about it in the morning,” Lew said. “Look, let’s get one thing square right now,” he said. “You’re damn lucky, both of you. Different cop, different couple of kids or a different place, tonight goes another way. You understand me? You’re lucky.” 

He thought of his father on a cold winter’s night, drunk on whiskey and impunity. Bat in his hand like that wine bottle, blood on the snow like cabernet. 

She blushed. She knew it; she’d probably thought about it tonight, maybe in the back of the police car. Maybe she’d even said it to him: My father will get me out of this. He thought he might’ve said the same thing when he was young. 

“I didn’t do anything,” she said. 

“Well, you were doing something, and driving too damn fast while you did it. I don’t much care what, but for Christ’s sake, at least have the sense not to get caught.” 

She muttered something a shade too low for him to make out. 

“What was that?” he asked. 

“I said, you got caught too.” Her eyes widened, as though part of her was shocked she’d said it. Her expression reminded of him of the look she’d given him across the dinner table earlier, a mixture of imperiousness and surprise at her own audacity. 

“What are you talking about, Betsy?” 

“The horses don’t have colic,” she said. “Dick lied just now.” She leaned hard on that word, _lied_. He wondered if part of her still thought lying was the worst a person could do. She knew, he realized. She was mincing words, but there was no mistaking her meaning. She was lobbing a spitball with grenades on reserve. 

Lew laughed, kneejerk, big and booming. He pictured this, sometimes, being confronted. He always laughed first, laughed in their faces. You think I’d do that? You think that’s what I am? He’d play it withering, as though they ought to be embarrassed. Me, with him? As though anything were more likely, more desirable than that. But in truth, saying those words about Dick sickened him even in a daydream, and now he was in front of her he found he didn’t relish the thought of embarrassing her any more than he already had.

So she knew, he thought. So she’d leave. He thought he could live with that. He went to sit beside her on the couch. “Yeah,” he said. “He lied.” 

“When I was a kid I’d have wanted him to be my dad.” 

You are a kid, he thought. He found himself smiling.

“He’d be a good one.” 

“Why isn’t he?” she asked.

As though everyone must be, as though marriage and the whole nine yards wasn’t morass enough without throwing their particularities into the mix. He shrugged. “He wasn’t married before the war,” he said. “Lots of guys were, but he wasn’t. Dunno why, you wouldn’t have thought he’d have a hard time of it.” 

Luck, he thought. Pure dumb luck is all. 

“And then afterwards--hell, I don’t know. We stuck together.” He kept his fingers knit between his knees. 

“You love him?” she asked simply.

He couldn’t say the words; he was too unpracticed. To translate thought to throat to tongue now felt like calisthenics, like running in sand. “Very much,” was what he managed. 

She nodded, brow knit thoughtfully. She put her hand on his arm. Fine long fingers, he thought a little wildly. Like Kathy’s; he’d always liked Kathy’s hands. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About the car. And--and everything.” 

Her hair was knotted up in a stout braid. It was beginning to come undone, and without thinking he reached out and brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. That made her look at him. She chewed at the inside of her cheek and sniffed, and then all at once she had her arms around him, her face pressed against his shoulder. 

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey. It’s all right.” 

He thought he ought to say something better, more fatherly, more profound. He could tell her, he thought, about the night long ago when he took the car out himself into the rain and haze, that he’d met something less savory than a policeman or a boyfriend. But he didn’t want her to think of the deer, dumb and gasping. He didn’t like to think about it himself. He used to dream he’d hit Dick with the car; he’d sprawl in the weeds the way the doe had, evacuate and die with no witnesses save Lew, his cut-rate executioner. 

And on the darkest nights of all when he thought of Dick at war without him, when he rolled and sweated between their bed and the wall in the house in Nixon he’d never see again he longed for that dream, clung to Dick’s body in the glare of the high beams and thought if it’s this or some lonely grave in Korea then God, let me do it myself. 

Betsy grew heavier in his arms now, the way Dick had in the barn, and he thought: it’s funny, isn’t it, the way sleep makes children of us all. 

He spoke in a murmur. He thought if she wanted it could be a lullaby. “You remember what you said that day when we went to feed the horses?” 

She nodded slowly. His shirt was wet between her cheek and his bicep. 

“The war was coming,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice about that, and I’d have gone either way. But you should know--you deserve to know. The day I joined up, that particular day. I ran. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”

“Why?” she asked. Her voice was muffled, small. 

“Because I was scared.”

She sat up then, wiping at her eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said. 

“It wasn’t your fault, or your mom’s fault. It was just me.” 

She considered his reply, chin propped on her hand. It must have been good enough for her, for when she spoke again it was only to say that she was tired. 

“Yeah, me too,” he said. “Go on up to bed, huh? I’ll see you in the morning. Hell, maybe you can take me for a spin in the MG.” 

After she’d gone upstairs he took a book from off of the shelf and held it open on his lap, but he didn’t read. He couldn’t focus, his thoughts scattered every which way. It was late enough he thought of simply getting up for the day, but he felt too worn out to go on as though nothing had happened. He listened to the sink running in the bathroom. When it shut off everything was quiet, and only then did he go up himself and slip into Dick’s room. 

He got undressed in the dark, pulled the covers back just enough to crawl in beside him. “Scoot over,” he said, for Dick was sprawled across the mattress like a starfish. 

Dick woke up quickly when prodded; he had a talent for it after the war. “What about Betsy?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep. 

“Betsy’s in bed,” Lew said. “And she, uh. She asked me if I loved you just now.” 

Dick stiffened a second. “Oh yeah?” 

“Yeah. Threw a bit of a wrench into my stern talking-to. I was going to compliment you on your colic story, but I guess it didn’t quite fool everyone.” 

“Well, never mind that,” Dick said, sliding his hand up under Lew’s shirt. It seemed a quick recovery, but what did Lew know. “What’d you tell her?” 

“That you followed me home from Europe and never left. That I suppose by now I’ve gotten used to having you around.” 

“Mm,” said Dick. “Sounds about right.” 

“Can I ask you something?” 

“Sure.” 

“Do you ever regret it?” 

“Never,” Dick said quietly. 

“Even back in Jersey? Back when I was so fucked up?” 

His throat tightened just thinking about it. He could taste those days rising up like bile, and he hadn’t had whiskey in years. Still they came back, in a smell or a look; the days he’d been so sure he was destroying the two of them and unsure whether or not he was expressly trying to. Still he wondered that he’d managed to fail at it so spectacularly, wondered at that night in the living room when Dick had blood on his face and refused to leave. 

Dick put his hand on Lew’s cheek, fingers folded, knuckles brushing the hollow beneath his eye. “You’re tired,” he said. “You should get some sleep.” He took a deep breath, let it out. Lew remembered him in the hayloft earlier, his hands on Lew’s body careful as a surgeon’s, steeling himself against his own pleasure. 

“And no, Nix,” Dick said. “Not even then.” 

***

Kathy sent a wire at the end of August. Betsy stood at the foot of the stairs and read it over and over, and then she offered the telegram to Lew with a guarded expression. “She’ll be back next week,” Betsy said. “Ugh, I’ll bet anything the twins are all sunburned and peely.” 

Lew stood beside her and checked her with a shoulder. “Cheer up,” he said. “And come on, you’ve missed the city. I miss the city, and I live here voluntarily.” 

She wrinkled her nose. “I guess,” she said. Then, “When’s dinner? I thought I might go for a ride.” 

When she was gone he went out to the porch and sat on the swing. She had saddled Tulip and taken her down to the bottom of the pasture where the ground was level, a makeshift riding ring. Round and round they went in a lazy oval, at a walk and a trot, and then as Lew watched she swung her leg back and pressed the horse into a reluctant canter. 

Dick came and sat beside him. He was drinking a bottle of Coke, which Lew had come to recognize over the years as his only real vice. Lew was smoking a cigarette, which was one of many. 

“She’ll be gone soon,” Dick said, nodding out at the field. 

“Summer’s almost over,” Lew said. 

“Will you miss her?” 

“Sure,” Lew said. 

“Yeah, me too.” He was watching her efforts on the horse with the same fond expression Lew caught him with more and more often when it came to Betsy. There were times he wanted to ask Dick if he regretted that, too, not having been a father. But the topic felt too fraught, called up too many strange pangs Lew couldn’t quite put a name to, what the two of them might have in some other world, someplace beyond imagining. 

“Hey,” Lew said presently. “I had an idea.” 

“Stop the presses,” Dick said. He draped his arm over Lew’s shoulder. When Betsy came back he might not even bother moving it, and that was a strange and thrilling notion. 

“What if we drove her back? We could make a trip of it. Swing by Harry’s, if they’ll have us. Spend a couple days in the city. I still want a vacation, and frankly I think I’m owed a night out, after everything.” 

“I guess you probably are,” Dick said. “Just a night out?” 

“Among other things.” 

“Huh. Better book the Waldorf.” 

Lew whistled. “You’ve got expensive taste.” 

“Well, I learned from the best.” 

As it happened, Harry would be happy to have them, and he was so tickled at the thought of meeting Lew’s daughter that Lew was slightly taken aback.

“No kidding,” Harry kept saying on the phone, when Lew told him how they’d spent the summer. “No kidding, Lew. Well hell, bring her over, we’ve got the room. We’ll put her in with the kids, and Kitty’ll cook, and we’ll all three catch up.” 

“I think he’s a little excited,” Lew said to Dick when he hung up. 

It seemed like no time at all before the date of departure was upon them. Lew made a chocolate cake for Betsy’s last night, and they sat around the table after dinner and ate far too much of it with glasses of milk. 

“You all packed up?” Lew asked. 

Betsy nodded, chasing dark crumbs around the cake plate with the pad of her finger. “Yes,” she said. 

“You call Fred?” 

“He says Buster’s a little mopey. Keeps looking at the door like he thinks you’re going to come back and get him.” 

Dick looked fretful at that. Lew kicked him under the table. “Don’t look so broken up,” he said. “He’ll be fine.” 

“He will,” Betsy added. “Mrs. Olmstead spoils their dog rotten.” 

“See? It’s a regular sanatorium. He won’t want to come home.” 

Dick hummed noncommittally. 

“Oh, poor Dick,” said Betsy, laughing, and that made Dick laugh too. 

“Will you write to him?” Dick asked, evidently eager to distract himself from thoughts of the dog. “Fred, I mean.” 

Betsy colored. “Sure, I think so. We’ll see what he’s made of himself by next summer.” She tossed her hair and reminded Lew very much of Blanche. 

Next summer. He’d floated the offer earlier in the day, when Dick had sent the two of them out to pick the garden clean before they left. “I don’t know if you’ll be interested next year,” he said. “You’ll probably be dying for the Riviera by then.” 

“I’ll think about it,” she said, looking pleased, and went back to picking tomatoes. 

After a minute she looked up, a streak of dirt on her cheek. She was tanned and her dungarees were sun-faded and muddy at the cuffs. She looked, in the moment, thoroughly unsophisticated. The sight of it warmed him, here in Dick’s garden in the fresh air. She could be theirs, he thought suddenly. His and Kathy’s, sure, but theirs too. 

“You should come for Christmas, though,” she said. “Make Dick come too.” 

They left mid-morning in Dick’s car, following cursory protests from Lew and from Betsy, who declared the Fairlane unstylishly domestic.

“It’s dependable,” Dick said, pulling onto the road, “and anyway, I’d like to see the two of you try to fit your bags in Lew’s car. He packs more than you do, Betsy.” 

“I do not,” Lew said, and Dick snorted. 

They meandered, taking detours and stopping at a sunny luncheonette for hamburgers that they ate outside at a picnic table. Betsy forced Dick into an elaborate discussion of names for his incumbent nephew. Lew took advantage of being ignored and watched Dick, who was sucking on another Coke and sporting a frankly upsetting pair of sunglasses, the first pair Lew could remember seeing him wear. 

In the city they’d go to a supper club they liked, the kind that was exclusive enough to look away from two men together so long as you weren’t obvious about it, the kind of place Lew might run into someone from back in the old days before the war and introduce his good friend Dick, and rather than think it strange they’d think Lew stylish, au courant. 

There were other places, too; more down-at-heel and less conspicuous, places they could touch, or dance. But Lew didn’t like taking Dick through unmarked doors. It made him feel seedy, which he probably was, but which Dick certainly wasn’t. Lew couldn’t stand the thought of the association, and he knew Dick worried enough about raids to steal the fun from the whole endeavor. So they went to the Rainbow Room, or to the theatre. Lew would nurse a single drink and toy with the thought of asking Dick if maybe they shouldn’t try and make some friends who were _simpatico_ , and wonder if he’d refuse, just as he wondered at the answer if he were to give in to temptation and ask Dick, casually as anything, _So, do you think you’re a queer?_

He wondered the same about himself, and if it really mattered either way. He didn’t know that it did--not now when they were mostly happy, neither of them particularly beset by the need to put a name to things beyond simply _us_. 

When they arrived they found Harry waiting for them in the driveway, a fact he attempted to downplay by paying very close attention to the flowerbeds as they parked the car. He abandoned his efforts as soon as they got out, bounding over to Dick and Lew and engaging them in various bouts of affectionate hitting as Betsy looked on with an expression of polite concern. 

“It’s okay, Bets,” said Lew, cuffing Harry on the back of the head. “He was raised wrong, is all.” 

“Better than you, Lewis. But hey, I can already tell you’ve broken the mold with Betsy here.” He extricated himself from Lew and offering his hand. “Harry Welsh,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” said Betsy. 

“You all come inside,” Harry said. “I’m sure Kitty’s got the coffee on.”

When they came inside Kitty swept up from the kitchen table and hugged them as though they’d see her more than a handful of times in the decade since her wedding.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Kitty said, one arm around Dick’s waist. “He hasn’t talked about anything else since you told him you were coming. And this must be Betsy? Oh, Lewis. She looks exactly like you.” 

He looked at Betsy, who looked back as though she wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or embarrassed but was content to settle on both. There was a sudden clamor from the hall, and the kitchen door swung open to reveal the three Welsh children, slight and tow-headed like Harry and staring at them in unmasked fascination. Lew was beginning to feel a little like a zoo exhibit. 

“They’ve been looking forward to meeting you too, haven’t you?” said Kitty. The middle girl smiled shyly and gave Betsy a little wave. 

“Our cat just had kittens,” she said hurriedly. “Out in the shed. I can show you if you want.” 

Betsy smiled. “I’d like that,” she said. She looked at Lew. “Can I, Dad?” 

He waved her off, hoping to God Dick would quit looking at him the way he could see out of the corner of his eye. The children drained from the room, moving off through the house in a cloud of noise. 

“Well, now they’re taken care of,” Harry said. “Who wants coffee?” 

***

After dinner and dessert Kitty made herself scarce. The kids were upstairs, Betsy nodding off on the sofa. “We thought we’d put you guys in the guest room,” said Harry. “I told Kitty you wouldn’t mind racking together.” 

“Of course not,” said Dick evenly. 

They were out on the front steps, Lew and Harry smoking, Dick with his neck craned watching the night sky. Lew wondered if he missed the farm, the quiet. Wilkes-Barre was a hamlet compared to New York, but even so it felt overlarge, louder than Lew was accustomed to. 

“Sure is a nice place you’ve got here, Harry,” Dick said. If the bustle of town was too much for him, he wasn’t letting on. 

“Hey, thanks. But I can’t take credit, the house is all Kitty.” 

“Give her my compliments then, will you?” 

Harry nodded. He was bouncing one leg against the concrete the way he used to do when he was nervous. He might be in the stick, the way he looked, the way he was smoking like he’d never have the chance again, necking his beer. 

“What’s with you?” Lew asked, kicking at Harry’s leg. 

“What? Nothing,” Harry said. 

“Come on, you look like hell. I know you’ve missed me, Harry, but honestly.” 

“Oh, shut up,” Harry said, scuffing the stoop with the heel of his shoe. “Fine. I’ve--I’ve gotta ask you two something, all right? Kitty’s been at me something fierce to do it, and she’ll have my head if I don’t now you’re finally here.” 

Lew couldn’t help it; he shot a look at Dick, whose expression was unreadable. “Oh?” he said. “All right. I can’t speak for him, but I’m an open book. Fire away.”

Dick smiled at them both then, a little uneasily, if Lew read him right. He had to be correct in thinking they hadn’t much to fear from Harry Welsh, but even so. 

“God, this is stupid,” Harry muttered as if to himself. 

His ears had gone scarlet and he scrubbed a hand down his face. Suddenly Lew had a flash of him years before, sitting out on the porch at the farm and watching Dick. Whatever it was worth, he was glad it was the three of them here together now, for there were things Harry might say to Lew that he wouldn’t to Dick. Let Harry think anything he liked about Lew, but let him leave Dick out of it. 

“All right, all right,” said Harry. “Here it is, and don’t hate me for prying. We--that is, Kitty and I. We just want to know--look, are you happy, the way things have shaken out?” 

“Happy?” Dick said quietly. 

Harry nodded. 

“Yeah,” Dick said. “I’m happy. You happy, Lew?” 

His expression had softened. He was looking at Lew the way he might if Harry wasn’t there, and Lew wondered suddenly if maybe Dick hadn’t always looked at him like that no matter the company. Harry was looking back and forth between them both, the set of his body anticipatory, knee jiggling frantically. 

“Sure am, Dick,” Lew said. If he wasn’t at least a little facetious he wasn’t sure what might happen. 

“Well, good,” Harry said, clapping his hands. “I told her you two were all right, but you know her, she needs to hear it straight. Straight through me, anyway. Good. I’m glad. Then don’t be strangers, okay? We’ve always got room, and I--well. Don’t listen to me, I’m drunk. The only goddamn one too, now Nix is on the wagon. Still dunno how you swung that, Dick, but now you’re both making me look bad.” 

He kept on like that in a rush, saying at last that he was beat and that they all ought to go to bed but that he couldn’t sleep til they had a game of cards, officer’s poker, what can you play with three, Lew? Where’s Lipton when you need him, and Ron fucking Speirs? He blew back into the house like a tornado, and Lew made to follow. Dick stopped him, though, slipped two fingers into the waistband of Lew’s trousers and pulled him softly back. 

“Hi,” Dick said when they were face to face.

“Fancy meeting you here.” Lew slid an arm around Dick’s waist. It came naturally by now, this sort of closeness, like Dick’s warm look. Harder not to touch him like this. 

Dick nodded in the direction of the house. “How about that,” he said. 

Lew shook his head. “Typical Harry. Only half certain what he’s talking about, but damned if he doesn’t keep going.” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dick said. “I think between the two of them they might have an idea of what they’re talking about.” 

“Well, if we’re betting, my money’s on Mrs. Welsh.” Lew turned to look at the house. “Better go in. Harry’ll be out here looking for us any minute. You know he can’t stand to be left alone.” 

Dick laughed, turned to look at the house. “You’re right. But you know, if they do know,” he said, “then I guess I’m glad.”

Lew shrugged. He wasn’t sure whether or not he ought to be glad. Old habits, he guessed, the way you keep a secret close, cup it in your hand, wonder if you won’t lose something in the sharing. “Doesn’t change much,” he said, though already he thought he was leaning towards felicity. 

From the house there came a benevolent-sounding crash. Harry began to curse. Lew moved off, but Dick put a hand out and caught him again, held him fast just for a moment.

“No,” Dick said. “But I’m glad anyway.” 


End file.
